NewsLine Column: The Cross-Media Menagerie

Cross-platform advertising strategies are becoming increasingly common in these days of fragmentation and media neutrality. With this in mind, James Papworth, ad marketing manager at IPC Prospector, suggests that planners and buyers need to look towards more altruistic research techniques to help them create effective cross-media campaigns.

I was always told that to target an advertising campaign towards youth, I should plan on using outdoor. Then again I was always told that to target youth I should use magazines… and cinema… and pre-peak Saturday night TV… and videos… and radio – lots of radio… and how about that internet thing… and bus tickets… and concert venues… curry-take-away-box lids… sponsor an ice hockey team… and extend the brand into skateboard clothing.

When it came to it though, most youth campaigns went pretty much down the same road. A launch on outdoor, TV to create some aspirational excitement and close the loop with some targeted press.

It’s not that expanding the media framework into “niche” areas wasn’t on the agenda, or even examined closely, but it just wasn’t the done thing. And even if creative, buying, accountability, delivery and effectiveness questions could have been answered, where would I have got sufficient evidence to convince both myself, and my client, that media X was worth planning in, in the first place?

Back then of course, media consumption was much less varied, so advertising platforms didn’t have to be. Evidence proving a media’s claim for inclusion in a campaign came from TGI, NRS and RAJAR. Who and how many times!

These days media consumption is varied, and if clients want to achieve a sufficient weight of communication with their audiences to make that step-change of difference, they can either swamp one media and wait as consumers come to them or, go forth and media-multiply, hunting their consumers out.

For example, on average, 16-34 housewives watch two hours less television each week than they did two years ago. Where have those hours gone?

Maybe more time reading magazines (Henley Centre), or more time on the web (Forrester), possibly more time SMS texting (Continental Research), more time at the leisure centre (ONS) or simply more time having take-away curries (Dipali Restaurant, Palmers Green).

Whatever they are up to, advertisers hoping to connect with customers in a meaningful way must expand their media list and each media must pitch in for being the right place at the right time. Fortunately, most media now have some sort of reliable study to add empirical evidence to their sales pitches and support gut feel.

But in this age of more ‘tailored’ media, reach/coverage numbers count for less. So while BARB, NRS, POSTAR and RAJAR are great at providing a trading currency, oiling the commercial wheels of the ad industry, Einstein has already figured that out “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

As media becomes more selected, what consumers get from ad messages is increasingly determined by where they see them. As they are seeing them in far more places, insights into how these media are regarded and evidence of the effectiveness of cross-media scheduling is required. In these days of media neutrality, it’s the cross-media and the altruistic research tools, which examine ‘communication’, which are coming to the fore.

A couple of studies come to mind. Absorbing Media from the PPA gives an insight into how consumers ‘value’ different media, including the internet, and how this effects their regard to adverts which appear within them.

Then there’s the ongoing Media DNA consortium, busily using the language of account planners to describe media brands – brave, pragmatic, rash, foolhardy, reliable, trustworthy and sexy. Media planning is after all a black art, the alchemy mixing a product’s brand values with media brand values to come up with an effective campaign.

I hope there are more, because studies like this are vital in supporting multi-media decisions, which in turn, fuel the need for more studies like this.

Of course, both the media inventions themselves, such 3G phones, interactive TV and SMS dialogue and the imaginative use of them by planners and creatives, will always outpace any research into their effectiveness. But for them to come off the bench and, rather than having the odd run-out, become regular players in the Media Schedules First XI, then proof of performance, predicted or actual, is required.

Media owners are pushing this position. Maybe historically they should have done more but historically most media had separate owners. Now, most big media owners own more than one media so researching and promoting multi-platform campaigns makes sense.

A big issue also remains of who to sell to? Even now a one-hour multi-media pitch Is so often met with “very interesting, but I only work on press”.

So the proof-of-performance challenge is also laid down to agencies. Instead of talking a good game of media neutrality and integrated cross-platform campaigns, actually equip themselves with the internal structures to permit cross-platform planning and vitally, cross-platform buying.

With that in place, cross-platform researchers can equip cross-platform sellers with arguments to persuade cross-platform planners and cross-platform buyers.

Then planners will have sufficient evidence to convince both themselves and their clients, that media X is worth planning in, in the first place!

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