Q is for...Quality

The elements of media quality that can increase your advertising effectiveness

The fragmentation of media and modern marketing communications has created an almost infinite number of ways for brands and advertisers to shape the way people think, feel, act and transact across time.  

Which is both a blessing and a curse, as so many choices can become potentially paralysing when planning; hence short hands and short-cuts can often help make better choices, faster.

The one I use the most, subconsciously without thinking about it, is this triangle below.

As every choice we make on behalf of clients about the inclusion or exclusion of a channel, platform, publisher or format creates potential trade-offs or required trade-ups across the others to achieve what’s required.

Let me illustrate this with some logic that demonstrates how these elements connect.

Reach 

You may have a really clear sense of who the target audience is, the size of that audience and how many people within it need to experience what it is you have to say or convey; however you only have finite budget in most cases.  

Therefore, the cost of reaching each person, each time, across time, within priority channels comes into consideration.

Cost

Crudely, what is the relative cost of reaching people in one option vs. another?

Crucially, can the budget available reach enough of the target audience, in your channel or across your channel mix, regularly enough to achieve your goals?

Optimising your channel mix might help you pay less for each impression, to reach more people, more regularly, but not all impressions are equal by any stretch; which is influenced by the final and arguably most important part of the triangle. 

Quality

Different channels and contexts have different effects on how communications are experienced, perceived and remembered; or in simpler terms, their impact on people. 

Take video for example. 

A 60” film packed with emotional punch, will more often than not be more memorable than a key visual; however it will also cost more for people to fully experience, as it requires more than a glance.

Hence you’d better be sure what you pack that message with is worth the trade-up.

However, it’s not just what you’re distributing, the context in which those 60” films are experienced within must be considered as well as the associated trade-offs.

A 60” ad served to me as a promoted post in my Instagram feed that I flick past without really noticing vs. a skippable YouTube mid-roll, on my mobile, that my son is watching whilst I’m trying to work that he immediately skips vs. the last ad that plays before the opening whistle of your nation’s first World Cup match in a heightened emotional state… inevitably create different depths of experience and with it impressions in our minds.

These different contexts, connect with different mindsets and carry differing amounts of prestige courtesy of who else might also use them or appear alongside you; hence come with a different cost per contact and reach potential vs. any given target audience.

An absolute head-wreck when you first consider or try to plan with these variables in-mind… but over time are considerations savvy media planners will pick up and consistently juggle in their minds each and every time they’re making recommendations.

Hence for this post Q is for… Quality

Where I’ll share a simple map you can build in three easy steps to help visualise the relative reach potential and/or cost of reaching people across key channels you might have under consideration; but crucially how you might adjust those facts and figures by taking into account other elements of quality that media planners should be considering across every line item in each plan they’re putting out into the world.

By no means an exhaustive list but are the elements of quality that I’d consider fundamental; before leaving you with a consideration of how we will need to evolve best-practice to ensure we don’t just create a media ecosystem that’s brand safe and suitable, but citizen safe and suitable too.

Step One. Plot Audience Reach vs. Cost (Per Reach Point Ideally)

Basic hygiene for any planner should be to know how well candidate channels and the platforms, publishers or formats available within them can reach the target audience you’ve identified as being the key to yours or your client’s growth ambitions.

If you’re keen to find out more about audiences, in A is for…Audience across 3 parts I walked through how you can build an audience framework that reconciles the 3 key audiences you should have in-mind when planning, implementing and measuring campaigns.

First-up plot the weekly reach potential of candidate channel vs. your target audience, or whichever period of time you have reliable data, uniformly available.

It might look a little something like this.

However, this is just one point of the triangle, yet to be adjusted for some important factors.

Therefore, you should plot each channel’s reach potential against the relative cost of accessing your desired audiences at a broad level.

If you have relatively small budgets a headline CPM (the cost of 1,000 ad impressions vs. you target audience in that medium) might suffice to draw suitable comparisons; a more sophisticated approach is to use a “cost per reach point” or the cost of reaching each % of the target audience that’s available to you via that medium, partner, platform or format in a given time period.

Be sure to adjust those rates if you’re using longer, larger or non-traditional formats as these can often dramatically impact the relative cost of inventory.

Be sure to check how these figures change based upon demographic differences too.

As you’ll see plotting the reach vs. the cost to reach people will start to pull apart the candidate channels into different clusters for your consideration.

Whilst important considerations, the reach potential and the headline cost of reaching people in those channels is only the starting point for your consideration.

Step Two. Overlay the “attentiveness” of each channel

One fact that’s often lost amongst marketers and advertising practitioners is that paid advertising only creates the opportunity for your ads to be seen, by no means any guarantee that they’ll actually be seen.

Hence why the projected frequency that’s stated on media plans that clients will sign-off is the abbreviation “OTS” an abbreviation of “Opportunities to be seen”.

For sure great creative, or creative uses of media, no doubt will earn more attention and “break the triangle”, but until recently it was difficult to pick apart the levels of actual attention earned and its contribution to overall advertising effectiveness.

This was until providers like LUMEN Research, System1 & Daivid amongst others started popping up to help map some of those gaps with eye-tracking software, extended with machine learning, that have started to quantify some of these previous leaps of creative faith.

Most advertising that’s put out into the world is pretty average though.

Thanks to Ehrenburg Bass it may be distinctive and well branded, but it’s unlikely to drive disproportionate attention; therefore any marginal gains in attention available in the way media plans are constructed become increasingly more important.

Over to us…

As you’ll see when you start to compare the cost of an impression (creating that “opportunity” to be seen) vs. the cost of delivering what LUMEN call “attentive seconds” these shifts start to become substantial.

You’ll notice certain channels that may seem expensive at first glance, become much better value and vice versa.

Hence you should always adjust the reach potential and/or the cost per reach point of your candidate channels to take its likely attentiveness into account. In an ideal world using some form of creative pre-testing to help validate channel / format choices.

Overlaying attentiveness really starts to paint a very different picture of what channels might be considered fun vs. fundamental based upon what it is you need to achieve.

Step Three. Adjust one more time to represent
Brand “Safe” & “Suitable” Platforms, Partners & Inventory

Earlier in my career, I was naïve enough to think that a couple of kick-off spots in prime-time and some high-indexing programs and publishers were enough to make what seemed a perfectly good plan a great one.

Job done, off to the pub. Back again on Monday.

However, these new research techniques from the likes of LUMEN that I mentioned are starting to quantify what we’ve intuitively known all along… around how important it is to get granular across every line and line item in the media plan to raise the floor of potential outcomes.

Their recent research started to unpack how choices in our control as media planners such as the programme, station, daypart or day of week that advertising appears within can result in significant spreads in how much attention is given to the same ads – all of which are choices at our discretion.

Which is why this final step, to compare and contrast the available options based upon the “True” rates and reach potential of the choices you wish to make, that take into account the desired qualities and characteristics of the inventory you wish to access is such an important one.

Elements of quality, many of which I’ve detailed here, that may suppress or potentially super-charge your outcomes…

…be warned though, in most instances the choosier you wish to be, the more you’ll need to pay, however this can help you have grown-up, informed conversations with clients and creative partners around which of any more extravagant plays you might wish to make may warrant a place on the plan.

Or how you might make trade-offs elsewhere to make them happen.

Ultimately, best practice for scaled brands requires balancing and blending any statement placements that help the brand stand-out and stand apart, with more pragmatic reach drivers that can regularly refresh associations across time.

Looking forwards. Towards “Citizen” Safety & Suitability

What I’ve outlined in this post are the “fundamentals” of quality that should be under consideration when crafting or contemplating a plan; but many of these principles were born in an era when advertisers knew exactly where their ads were placed and could even get copies if they desired.

Brand safety was baked in.

Today an average programmatic plan has thousands of websites on it from all over the world. Some of it written by humans, much of it generated for advertisers by machines.

Much like there is no way Facebook can guarantee what gets posted, seen and served to all or some of their users isn’t hateful or harmful, there’s no guarantee in such a diverse and distributed media supply system that any brand or advertiser will show up in safe and suitable contexts, content and environments, or that vulnerable citizens are shielded from advertising that may end up directly or indirectly hurting them.

Not to mention whether those ad $$$s are directly or indirectly funding the expansion of hateful or harmful organisations.

How might an evolved set of media “Quality” standards help remedy this?

Platforms like Integral Ad-Science are helping de-risk overt, obvious and potentially damaging errors when advertisers and agencies trade programmatically; but moving forwards I believe the emphasis will broaden from “brand shaped” safety & suitability practices, to incorporate more “citizen shaped” ones too.

Evolving the standards by which we include or exclude inventory and subsequently prioritise or de-prioritise partners that will…

… de-fund and de-oxygenate hateful, or harmful publishers, platforms and distributors
… exclude vulnerable audiences such as children, problem gamers, gamblers, consumers or spenders from seeing advertising that may end up directly or indirectly hurting them
…reduce what might be considered overly predatory data collection, extraction, mining and refining techniques

I could go on, but you get the point.

The combination of which lead to further development of bespoke, responsible media marketplaces, with associated partners, placements and inventory the likes of which our Diageo clients are truly leading – advertiser by advertiser based upon the elements of quality that mirror their vision and values.

It will be the expansions of these early approaches, that will start to re-tool ad-tech that’s been built to target people based on their propensity to do things, to also start better protecting society as an ever more significant % of ad-dollars move from manually traded to programmatic methods.

Who knows, these types of plays may even make programmatic the safest and most suitable set of spaces to advertise within moving forwards, rather than arguably the most dangerous.

Until next time : )