I am frequently shocked by the absence of the word ‘opportunity’ in media plans. Too many advertising, marketing, sales and media people have lost sight of the fact, or never realized, that our media measurement tools measure opportunity; they do not yet measure ad exposure.
The gap between an opportunity for exposure and actual exposure is vast in all media measurement; however, nowhere is that gap greater and more oblique than in newspaper measurement. Here, research tools such as NADbank’s readership numbers predict the opportunity to expose a consumer to an ad, without differentiating between a full page, full colour or an earlug. The metrics don’t distinguish between sections, days of the week and seasons.
Occasionally, a more enlightened media planner or seller will introduce the word ‘opportunity’ in a reach-frequency statement. The statement might read, ‘This schedule will have the opportunity to reach 75% of the target audience at least once; the average prospect will have the opportunity to see the ad six times.’
What if we were to replace the word ‘opportunity’ with its synonym ‘chance’? ‘This schedule will have a chance to reach 75% of the target audience at least once; the average prospect will have a chance to see the ad six times.’
It sounds a lot like gambling, but it’s much less misleading.
It seems that our industry has become too comfortable with the status quo. We can’t reliably or systematically predict how that chance or opportunity varies according to ad size, colour, position, day of week, season, or section. Don’t advertisers – the food of the media food chain – deserve more?
Newspaper readership is in steady decline. In 1992, 68% of Canadian adults read a daily newspaper yesterday. By 2002 the number dropped to 54%. Every year I get those pesky letters explaining that line rates are going up 3% to 6%. It’s the cost of paper, labour and whatever, they explain. So the advertisers get less and less chance, but keep coming back for more, and media sellers – and in all fairness, we media buyers – continue to offer up some kind of oblique chance at exposing their messages: an ‘opportunity to see’ we sometimes call it.
I’m hoping, perhaps naïvely, that in the face of declining readership, and increasing costs, increasing clutter and decreasing effectiveness, that some day I’ll get a letter from a newspaper telling me it has decided to take steps to care for the advertiser, to keep him or her coming back…to keep the food in the food chain.
The Holy Grail of advertising accountability is to create a straight line, a cause-and-effect relationship between advertising investment and sales. We media people need to start on this quest by providing advertisers with reasonable predictions of how many people will actually see their ad, and not how many people will have a possible chance of seeing the ad.
Learning how many people actually do see our jr. page ad may be shocking, and some people think this knowledge could scare off advertisers, but I think it could encourage them.
We need to start with the shared conviction that newspaper advertising works. And how it works starts with finding out how much it really costs – by asking, ‘How many people will see my ad?’ In that answer lies the future of newspapers as an advertising medium.
Mark Sherman is CEO of Montreal- and Toronto-based Media Experts. He can be reached at: marks@mediaexperts.com
