How To Optimise The Brand TV Budget – MRG Evening

How to increase the sales effectiveness of your advertising campaign without increasing your budget and by only marginally increasing your TVRs was the theme of the MRG evening held on 20 July. Speaking were Callahan Oherlihy and Paul Baker of OHAL, with a seminar entitled “How to Optimise the Brand TV Budget.”

Paul began by describing what is needed to “optimise a budget”, or the basic toolbox.

• budget size
• sales and cpt seasonality/regionality
• messages
• sales effect

In order to calculate how to optimise your budget, you first have to discover how people respond to ads. Paul proposed two theories:

* Effective Frequency Range – EFR

People switch on at for example 3 exposures, and then off again at 6 exposures

* Explosive Trigger Threshold – ETT

Differs from EFR in that there is no switch off assumed.

Optimisation is sensitive to the Explosive Trigger Threshold. For example a low trigger threshold implies that the optimum plan would be frequent, small bursts.

At this point, Paul paused to say that the results he had outlined so far were fairly obvious and common knowledge, so, he asked, does the behaviour of media planners show this insight? He concluded, no. “In most cases, the argument is better argued than implemented.”

Callaghan Oherlihy then took over to describe how to actually use the data for media planning.

He then gave an example of a TV campaign, advertising a child’s toy. The aim was to link the time when a child had seen the optimum number of messages, as closely as possible to the purchasing time, (in this case just before Christmas.) In this way, and without increasing the budget, sales effectiveness was up 33%.

Paul then commented on other methods to work out the trigger thresholds;

It is possible to use cross sections, but this method is flawed, as was explained in an article in Admap, June 1994 by Andrew Robs. The conclusion of the article is that cross section data is biased, becuase not all viewers are medium viewers, and therefore some will see more messages than they need to, to get the optimum sales response curve.

There were then questions. Michael Stewart said that although the arguments put forward were rational, there were two drawbacks: one, that an econometric consultancy would need to be employed to carry out the calculation methods; and two, that it would mean a change in the way people buy television. Paul responded that changes do need to be made.

Peter Overy, who had chaired the meeting, then asked if a rating on breakfast television was worth the same as on the rest of television. The reply came that for toys it certainly was very effective. OHAL had done some research into medical products advertising on breakfast television, which had more impact than advertising on the rest of television, but they had to concede that more research had to be carried out.

Derek Bloom then asked for their experience in the sales effectiveness of a multi-media campaign, as opposed to a straight TV campaign. The reply came that money spent on TV and press is much more effective than solus TV; the same applies for TV and radio, although of course this is dependent on the market.

A final cheeky question was whether the improved efficiency gained by employing econometric consultants is cost effective. The honest answer was definitely, but only on an ad budget of more than £500,000.

OHAL: 081 318 7321