Thinkbox Needs You! Industry Feedback Key To New TV Planning Tool
Commercial TV marketing body, Thinkbox, is keen to engage with the media community for feedback as it develops its new television planning tool on the back of recently released research.
At last week’s Thinkbox conference at the Roundhouse in London, the group’s research and strategy director, David Brennan, outlined how the body would use the insights gained from its ethnographic study to build a planning tool to maximise engagement.
Mark Holden, executive planning director at PHD Network, said that there was no available data telling the industry how media affected people. He felt that neuroscience studies and the like were necessary to developing a system that would be able to measure how people are influenced rather than just the quantity of people that were reached by the medium of TV.
Holden also felt that a planning system for each agency would be welcomed, whilst David Wilding, strategic director at MindShare added that drilling down to micro level and “delving in as much as possible” would be useful.
Brennan agreed, saying the new system would hopefully be able to link into agencies’ other already existing systems and that it needed to “drill down” and be holistic.
The new system would focus on layering information on top of the currency to make it better, he said, adding that “we can make the currency work harder”, turning eyeballs into engagement.
“It’s about optimising engagement by bringing together audience context and content and tying them into the actual campaign objectives rather than just a target audience,” he said.
Jeremy Tester, director of insight at Sky Media felt that the new tool had to be “something that everyone in the industry can get their hands in to.”
Tester said that the next generation of media consumers would be engaged in a different way than the current generation, and that the current model needs to evolve.
Brennan indicated that Thinkbox was looking at extending the new tool across other media but that it should focus on sticking to the medium of television, and in areas such as the breaking down of channels, day parts, programmes and the context in which people view TV.
“Once we’ve got this one in place, if it works, if it’s felt that what we’ve done for TV is valid and appropriate and the industry says ‘well we’d like to employ the same principles across other media as well’, we’d certainly look at doing something about [extending the new tool],” he said.
“There’s got to be a real demand from the industry to want it and I think the only way that demand would come is if the planning tool that we create for TV itself is acceptable and offering some real value.”
Brennan said that developing the new tool has got to be interactive and intuitive, and that getting the whole planning community involved was key, primarily through online engagement. “We can do that remotely, we can feed data through to [them] so that they can give us insight and feedback as to what they think it means and how they think it should relate back to the planning process,” he said.
“That way it’s something that is actually useable and that the industry feels it has ownership over rather than just another media owner planning tool that tends to be viewed with some kind of suspicion.
“We don’t know the answer to all of the [industry’s] questions because we’re talking about every single aspect of planning not just media or creative or strategic planning,” he added.
“Because of that, and certainly no media owner has ever created anything which is trying to bridge those different planning disciplines all within the same data source, it would just be too arrogant of us to assume that we knew all of the answers.”
At this early stage, Brennan says the feedback from the industry on the study has already been great. “From our point of view it’s fantastic because this sort of data has never been made available before… I think what is happening is it’s making people realise that when you get somebody in front of a TV commercial, you can expect some real reaction and some real involvement,” he said.
“I think the great thing is with all the video footage that we’ve got from the ethnographic survey – it’s made apparent that how people respond to commercials varies quite a lot.”
Brennan admitted that in future Thinkbox would be looking at other television platforms and content vehicles over the next 12 months, in terms of usage patterns and different behaviours, but said that would be separate to the current study.
“Then as and when we revisit engagement at a future date we would probably be bringing those platforms back into the study, especially as I think there’s going to be a lot of interest from the industry on how people are using mobile TV, what added value people get from IPTV and that sort of thing,” he said.
However, he feels that at the moment the technologies are still emerging, with relatively small penetration and usage patterns that have not settled down as yet.
“Our aim is to have something in the field that people can use – even if it’s just a first pass at a planing tool – probably by the summer,” Brennan divulged.
“What we’d like to do is have something that’s very useable and proving itself by the time we get to the autumn schedules.”
Those in the industry with an interest in providing feedback on the body’s ethnographic study and input on the development of the new planning tool should visit the Thinkbox website.
The group is in fact looking to recruit someone to manage the online feedback forum on a day to day basis. Brennan stated that some sort of blog may even be set up to make sure the issues are being aired and debated and to keep the dialogue going.
“My only restriction at the moment is getting the right person who can do that and actually have at least an understanding of how the planning process works at those different levels – media, creative and strategic,” he noted.
Thinkbox is planning to hold a half-day seminar at the end of this month in order to go into the research in more depth, with a range of speakers to look at all aspects of the findings from a variety of perspectives.