CFCN-TV, Calgary
The biggest need is for television to be able to show advertisers the value of their product to a specific category of business.
Not all shows are created equal. You know how airlines and hotels price their product – the person sitting beside you might have paid more, less, or the same. The value of the seat is different for each one of us, even though it’s the same plane, going to the same destination.
What I’m saying is, television advertising and programming aren’t always of the same value to every advertiser. Yet the media, over the years, have priced the products the same and the agencies have paid the same.
You know the old thing about women 18-49. Last time I checked, all women 18-49 are not created equal. Different segments of that women 18-49 population would be worth more to one advertiser than another.
The need to be able to demonstrate that to the advertiser is where our industry needs to go. We do research of our own on psychographics, lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors, because we’re trying to practise what we preach in filling that gap. But that type of approach is not being fulfilled by BBM [Bureau of Measurement] or [A. C.] Nielsen at the moment.
We need to be able to say that we’re not going to market our inventory to our advertisers based on some of the will-‘o’-the-wisp target group called women 18-49. They see themselves not as a broad target group, but as individuals with unique buying patterns. We need to be able to show marketers how to market their products based on that knowledge.
We’re already involved in a program called Consumer Market Profile (cmp), otherwise known as Leigh Stowell & Company out of Seattle. We’ve been doing this for seven years, trying to move down this path. We need to be able to market media better than we’re doing it now, because the advertisers need to know who they are reaching. We have to target more precisely.
Each spring, Stowell surveys 1,000 adults, 18+ in Calgary. It’s based on some of our programs, because we need to find the composition of who is watching what, what the lifestyles, attitudes, etc., all are.
But Stowell is not a rating service. And yet, the industry continues to buy on the rating services. We need to have an amalgamation of some kind, of the Stowell data and traditional rating services.
I have been unsuccessful in trying to bring bbm, Nielsen and Stowell together to make those things happen.
