The Royal Bank is reaping the benefits of a new media-planning system, one that has changed the way the bank buys media and, consequently, the way it expects media outlets to report their audiences.

Peter Case, vice-president of advertising for Royal Bank, says the new system is based on Geographic Information Systems, or gis, a tool that allows marketers to categorize narrow geographic areas according to the media-purchasing habits and socio-demographic profiles of the people living within them.

Royal Bank’s model – the Geodemographic Media Planning Model – mines the gis database by combining Compusearch’s PSYTE Market Segmentation System with a media-scoring index developed by Royal Bank’s aor, Initiative Media. Case says the new hybrid has resulted in savings of 20% to 43% on four separate media buys, all in newspaper, that the bank has made this year.

Case says the idea started nearly five years ago, when he started looking for a means of print planning and buying that was more reflective of the bank’s niche marketing and buying approach.

gis was emerging in the marketplace around that same time, as was expertise in cross-referencing demographics, media consumption and purchasing behavior by a person’s enumeration area (ea) and/or their forward sortation area (fsa) – larger groupings of postal-code areas signified by the first three characters of the postal code.

He found newspapers weren’t much interested in changing the way they reported circulation; and agencies were reluctant to look beyond basic measurements like cost per thousand (cpm) and reach/frequency, so Case decided to try to develop a better system himself.

Case first turned to Compusearch to see if its database – which places every enumeration area in Canada into one of 60 predefined clusters, or socioeconomic and behavioral categories, – was compatible with Royal Bank’s database of over nine million customers.

Since enumeration areas are too small to be practical for Royal Bank, it organises the database using the larger fsa.

‘I was making the assumption that since we have in the financial institution category about 12% or 13% of the market – and in the bank category closer to 25% – I could probably make some assumptions that our customers, and what they were doing in those fsas across the country, would probably be reflective of the kinds of things people in the area were doing with other financial institutions.’

Royal Bank first tested the system with a campaign to reach first-time homebuyers in the Vancouver area, where they discovered very specific pockets of the lower mainland area with a high concentration of first-time homebuyers.

Initiative Media then asked the area’s daily and weekly newspapers to report their circulation based on fsas and built an index rating each publication’s ability to reach those coveted first-time homebuyers.

Traditionally, Royal Bank would have bought the publications with the largest reach, The Vancouver Sun and The Province, but found that the target market could be reached more effectively with other publications and at a lesser cost. Case says the bank was able to buy 14 publications rather than two, increase its use of insertions from six to 28, and still save.

Royal Bank has since begun employing the system for television buys using psyte tv.

‘With increasing media options available to us, it is even more important to know where the micromarkets are,’ says Case.