A Guide to Continuous-Reach Advertising

Brands that keep on communicating with all potential customers are more likely to be thought of (and bought) by more people.

We present 5 guidelines for increasing the efficiency of any media budget for on-going brands. The greater cumulative reach you gain over time, and the more evenly you space your exposures then the shorter the ‘out of sight–out of mind’ period any consumer will ever experience for your brand. In practice this will mean thoughtfully spreading out advertising… over time and across media, channels and time-slots.

This report is divided into two parts. Part one explains why you should have a continuous cumulative reach advertising strategy, and part two explains how to do it.

PART 1: WHY CONTINUOUS-REACH?

Going silent

No brand manager has an advertising budget as large as they would like. In response marketers commonly limit their advertising to portions of the year or to a particular segment of the market. It’s common for advertisers to use up much of their budget in short bursts of heavy weights of activity, which necessitates periods of silence across the remainder of the year. Such periods of silence ensure that in many purchasing situations a consumer will have not seen the brand’s advertising for a long time, but is likely to have seen competitor advertising more recently.

In the 1970s, advertising researcher Herb Krugman likened media planning to physical distribution—a brand not physically on display cannot be bought —claiming that advertising must “rent the shelf” so that the brand would be “always there”, on display, as it were, and thereby easily accessible in consumers’ memory (Krugman, 1972). Four decades later, a wealth of empirical research has accumulated in strong support for this ‘shelf-space’ (Ephron, 1995) approach to media planning. Unfortunately, much media practice still lags behind.

In this report we provide an evidence-based argument against the common practice in media scheduling of concentrating advertising into short periods of advertising followed by periods of time “off-air”. To observe this practice you only need to watch TV tonight: you will see a small fraction of the commercials that air tonight and yet you will see the same few commercials many times over. Then watch again a few weeks later and many of these brands will now be absent – no longer on-air. You’ll see a similar phenomenon on your favourite web sites, billboards in your town and so on.

Why the bursts & long silences?

Advertising bursts are one symptom of addiction to ‘binge marketing’: big campaigns followed by hiatuses – a lull in which to plan and prepare the next flurry of activity. The culture and structure of marketing teams and advertising agencies promote such highs and lows: work cycles are set up this way. Another practical consideration is to ensure that retailer buyers and senior managers notice the campaigns. With a burst of advertising concentrated in time (or in one media, or vehicle) it’s easy to let colleagues know when or what to watch. Marketers live in some trepidation of running a campaign and their boss not noticing it. There is also fear that their creative copy choice will be judged on up-ticks in tracking and sales data, hence the temptation to burst. It’s up to senior management (i.e. the CMO & CEO) to fix these structural issues.

Some marketers bunch up their advertising within a time period in order to achieve a target level of gross rating points (GRPs). Program and event sponsorship deals also often result in bunching up advertising. We will explain the waste inherent in these practices.

These strategies often stem from the common myth that advertising below a certain level in a particular time period is somehow ineffective as it will be lost in the clutter. This myth is widely promulgated by brand tracking research agencies which require advertising to be run in bursts of activity followed by gaps of silence in order to make the needle move (up and down) on metrics derived from aggregate consumer surveys. This ‘research finding’ of a correlation between advertising activity and, say, advertising awareness, is simply a measurement artifact; it is not a real representation of advertising’s sales effect.

Brands need to reach more people

Research on brand growth shows that bigger brands have more customers than do smaller brands and that brands must reach all types of category buyers (particularly very light, occasional buyers) in order to grow (Sharp, 2010). If a brand is to become or remain a large market share brand, then its advertising must reach and remind many buyers.

All brands’ customer bases are comprised primarily of light, occasional buyers. However, there is a Natural Monopoly law (see Ehrenberg-Bass Sponsor Report #1) which states that the customer bases of larger brands contain an even greater proportion of light buyers (of the product category). The brands who succeeded in growing were the ones that were most successful in attracting many of these light category buyers; and are consistently able to keep doing so. This illustrates the principal challenge that all brands face if they want to grow: to find (cost effective) ways to consistently reach the buyers who are less active and interested in the category.

Decades of research into the sales effects of advertising provides further support for a broad reach media objective. Ads generally do their work immediately, and don’t need to be seen several times to have an effect or to be understood. A review of 100 real- world and laboratory studies with differing methodologies concluded, unsurprisingly, that “there are not increasing returns to advertising” (Simon and Arndt, 1980). That is, there is no wear-in period or S-shaped sales response to advertising. This is supported by single-source data describing individuals’ sales response to recent advertising exposure, it shows immediate diminishing returns and no wear-in period. That is, while exposing a consumer to more than one advertisement within a short time period is incrementally beneficial, it is cost inefficient as this strategy provides diminishing returns to the advertiser. One recent exposure is enough. Put simply, it is better to hit two people once, rather than one person a second time close to the first exposure.

So each dollar spent on advertising should aim to reach as many additional buyers as possible.

Brands need coverage across time

Refreshing and reminding, rather than persuading, is the primary way in which advertising works in modern competitive markets. Not surprisingly then our reviews of advertising content show that few ads actively seek to persuade the audience – most present soft messages (ideally throwing a spot- light on the brand) (Mills et al., 2000). These advertisements work – even one gentle reminder message can have a marked effect on brand purchase propensity ( Jones 1992, McDonald and Sharp, 2005, Taylor, 2010). These emotional entertaining advertisements that creatively publicise the brand work by refreshing memories and thereby nudging up purchase probabilities.

Because memories fade and must be refreshed, repetition is needed. However, this is not an argument for frequency of exposure within a short time window (e.g., in a campaign burst). It is best if that repetition is spread out over time. A media schedule that spaces advertising out across time helps to maintain the salience of the brand’s memory traces within buyers’ brains. Research shows that learning effects are greater if there is some space between exposures.; spreading out advertising exposures over time improves memorability by 10-20% (Sawyer et al., 2009). Repetition is important in terms of maintaining memories but bunching up exposures is inefficient. This may be partly because a repeated exposure close to the first one encourages the brain to employ screening mechanisms, given the tedium associated with the stimuli familiarity; whereas a second exposure at a later date can refresh previously established long-term memory structures and is less likely to be met with resistance.

It is also important to space out advertising exposures over time because this increases the chance an advertisement will coincide with a consumer’s next category purchase decision. Empirical studies of advertising decay rates (Wood, 2009, Newstead et al., 2009b) illustrate that advertising works better when seen closer to a purchase opportunity. Unfortunately, media planners never know which buyers are about to be faced with a purchase opportunity because consumers have brand repertoires and each individual comes into the category as-if -randomly (Ehrenberg et al., 2004). Until we have the technology to deliver advertising with pin-point accuracy only to individual consumers who are about to be faced with a category purchase opportunity, the obvious tactic is to spread out exposures. This improves the likelihood that when a consumer does next buy from the category, there is a good chance that they will have seen the brand’s advertising recently.

In today’s fragmented media environment some frequency (hitting the same people again after a recent exposure) is unavoidable. Because of declining reach efficiencies, high-reach plans will automatically also deliver higher average frequency figures. Frequency is easy to achieve, there’s no need to specifically plan for it. Indeed, it is dangerously easy to commission schedules that deliver low costs per exposure (CPM), but also deliver low reach and low cumulative reach per dollar (but high frequency).

Rapidly, within short time periods, additional points of reach start becoming very expensive to obtain as advertising dollars start delivering big gains in frequency rather than reach; gains that become increasingly unlikely to pay for themselves, as the incremental sales effect after the 10th exposure to an advertisement is much the same as it was after the 9th exposure. So it becomes better to take these dollars and spend them later; thereby trading off this excess frequency now, in order to buy reach at some later point of time.

Put simply, if we can afford to reach a shopper with two of our ads, then it is far better that they see one now and one next week, rather than one now and one in the next ad break.

Finally, and very very importantly, spacing out advertising is advantageous as it builds cumulative reach more cost effectively. If you want to hit all category buyers this week then you must spend a great deal of money, but if you spread your advertising out in time you can build the incremental reach to reach them all at a far lower cost.

In summary, a great deal of empirical evidence from all sorts of different places supports planning for reach and coverage of all consumer category purchase occasions over time. Importantly, the evidence comes from different researchers, different countries, and covers different types of advertising message and media *1.

*1. In actual practice the very largest brands, will come closest to achieving continuous reach – not necessarily from being smart but because of the size of their spend. Even if they wastefully bunch up advertisements, the sheer size of their spend means they are practically always on-air, in big reach media, and in a variety of media. So we would expect larger brands to have more efficient advertising spends; and this is precisely what research shows – big brands spend more, but less than expected for their size – see Jones, J. P. 1990 and Danenberg 2008.

Now we provide a guide for how to achieve a continuous-reach media strategy.

PART 2: HOW TO ACHIEVE CONTINUOUS REACH ON A BUDGET

5 principles to guide media strategy

In an idealistic sense, the media objective is to reach every category buyer immediately before every purchase opportunity (as close as possible to every purchase). Given that we don’t know when any individual will buy, that would mean 100% reach every day, or even every hour. Even brand managers with enormous marketing budgets cannot afford this, so all media plans involve trade-offs. To help marketing managers make these trade offs (that is, discard the less effective tactics in order to focus on the more effective) we present five fundamental guidelines for best- practice media scheduling strategy. These principles are adaptable and therefore apply to almost all advertising contexts, regardless of the size of the media budget.

COST AND CREATIVE CONSIDERATIONS

As well as the media principles we outline here, we recommend negotiating with the media or media agency well in advance to avoid paying last-minute premiums. We also recommend avoiding paying premiums for things such as a ‘highly engaged audience’ or ‘category exclusivity’ – the value of which is yet to be proven, as well as tending to come with an emphasis on frequency.

In a multi-media campaign you must also consider the impact of each media. A 30 second TV ad is likely to deliver different impact from a banner ad on a web page, or an outdoor billboard. While it may be possible to achieve more reach, more efficiently, using less impactful media (see for example the benefits of using 15-second instead of 30-second spots, Report 48 (Newstead and Romaniuk, 2009a)) this is a trade-off that requires careful consideration.

Advertisers can also record better efficiencies of the advertising budget by commissioning ads with great branding and ‘cut-through’ creative to increase the chance that the audience will watch the ad and identify the brand (Romaniuk, 2009).

There are also issues such as audience receptivity (‘engagement’) which varies by media and context – unfortunately there is little hard evidence to guide decisions in this area, and a great deal of hype and confusion.

1. Target the market

Advertising must reach all the people who buy from the category, and not just heavy users of the category, or worse only buyers of your brand. Nudging the brand purchase propensity of as many category buyers as possible is the priority; it is not the key task of advertising to remind heavy buyers of your brand to maintain their purchase habit (this will happen naturally with a broad reach strategy and the frequent experiences that heavy buyers have of your brand will be far stronger.)

Be careful not to fall into the common trap of setting a media target based on a narrow target buyer definition, as this ignores the majority of buyers, who cumulatively represent large profits and substantial growth opportunities. Setting a narrow target market will give the deceiving impression that big reach media are wasteful (as they reach many people outside of the narrow target). Narrow targets damage brands as they direct media buyers towards high cost, low reach niche media.

So, search for media options that deliver the highest reach of all category buyers per dollar.

2. Spread GRPs out over time

The simplest media scheduling tactic for a more effective use of a media budget is to extend the campaign period – i.e. more weeks on air and advertise as continuously as possible. For example, if you can afford only 12 ads per year then buy one per month, rather than concentrating all 12 within a single month.

All media plans should aim to have as few weeks of advertising silence as possible. For a given budget, the number of weeks with GRPs is more important than the number of GRPs per week.

There is no evidence to suggest that advertising below a certain level of GRPs per week is ineffective. Consultants who suggest otherwise are plagued with measurement validity issues; commonly, the instruments they use to assess advertising effectiveness can only detect the effects of bursts of advertising at extremely high GRP weights.

GRP threshold planning is often the rationale for commissioning a burst campaign pattern:

“If I only buy 40 GRPs per week, then no-one is going to see my ad!”

Wrong: 40 GRPs is 40 GRPs worth of people seeing your ad (that’s what 40 GRPs means). It is far more important to ensure that advertising occurs as continuously as possible, than it is to ensure that advertising occurs only above a certain level during the weeks in which it is on-air.

Burst strategies do deliver reach (albeit in a narrow time period), but they are a costly way of doing so. Spreading the budget over time delivers better value reach. That is, gaining reach within a restricted time period (e.g. a week) is subject to rapidly declining cost effectiveness per reach point. The second 50% of reach is vastly more expensive to gain than the first 50%.

For example, in Australia it requires merely 3 TVC spots road-blocked across the three largest commercial TV networks during prime-time (metro and regional) to reach a third of the entire population. Increasing reach much beyond this level in one single night requires considerably more spots (and more dollars), because you mostly end up reaching the same people again and again, thereby building frequency, but not incremental reach. Reaching 2/3rds of the population within a few nights isn’t difficult using TV, but considerably more spots (and dollars) are required to increase substantially past this level. Newspapers suffer even more from declining cumulative reach patterns because people who subscribe or habitually read the newspaper do so most days, while others habitually don’t. A major metropolitan newspaper delivers high reach with one edition, but advertising again in the same publication on the following day delivers little incremental reach.

Because of these declining cost efficiencies (continually building frequency for very little incremental reach) it soon becomes more sensible to stop striving for 100% reach in that time period and to begin holding back that money to put it towards gaining reach in the next time period (e.g. the following week), since both reach and continuity are the key media objectives.

SEASONALITY

While evenly spaced advertising is the default approach, category seasonality must also be considered. More advertising may be needed when fighting for share of a bigger market. For example, a Champagne advertiser should place more ads around the festive season, and space advertising out across the rest of the year. However, beware of falling into the trap of buying expensive media space in a period when everyone else is advertising. It could be that you are better off advertising more in cheaper periods.

Your advertising isn’t necessarily working any better in the ‘high season’ merely because greater sales lifts are visible; rather, it is because there will be visible lifts in sales of Champagne in the festive season that prompts Champagne marketers to increase their spend. However, Champagne is not only consumed in the festive season, so if we would expect to gain a share of some of these sales, then we need to support our brand with advertising. Furthermore, we would not want to introduce our brand to the market for the first time in 12 months only at this key sales period, but rather, have our advertising at this period building on a history of regular prior advertising. Our advertising is thereby refreshing memory structures, reminding the market about what they already know, building familiarity for our brand, rather than our brand ‘coming in cold’ and having to build memory structures. So, certainly up-weight your advertising a little during heavier sales periods (primarily, only to the extent that it is in line with the increase in sales; so, if a quarter of your sales come in a two month period, then by all means spend a quarter of your ad budget in that two month period), but not if it is far less cost-efficient to do so.

3. Look for incremental reach

At any point of time, or at any point in your media schedule, the next media or time-slot that you should buy is the one that delivers the highest additional (incremental) reach per dollar. Then the media bought in the second period should deliver as many people as possible who did not see the ad the week before, i.e. reach should cumulate across periods. It’s acceptable to achieve a lower reach target each period if the rate of cumulative reach across periods is still good and increasing. Consider two options for spending the same media budget: Option 1 delivers 20% reach per week, and after two weeks reach cumulates to a fraction above 20% (i.e. this plan reaches more or less the same people in both weeks). Option 2 also delivers 20% reach per week but cumulates to 30% reach after two weeks. If our population were 100 consumers then the first option has hit 20 of them twice (and 80 not at all), while the second option has hit 30 of them at least once (with 10 of this 30 hit twice). The second option will have the greater sales effect. It must be this way unless there are massive decay effects – that is, the impact of advertising on memory completely dissipates within a week, (in which case the two options would produce the same sales effect). For most advertising, the effect of an exposure on memory lingers, making it more cost efficient to cumulate reach across periods than to keep talking to the same people in each period.

Avoid a low reach (e.g. niche media) weekly plan that doesn’t cumulate reach quickly, even if the price (CPM) looks like good value. There is no point in talking to the same fraction of the market over and over again while neglecting the majority of potential consumers.

Note that some media are better than others at delivering incremental reach, for example, TV is better than newspapers: everyone watches TV, while not everyone reads the newspaper. And, for the most part, those people who do not watch TV in a given week, will be likely to do so in a subsequent week. Better (that is to say, bigger) media will deliver closer to 100% of the population in a shorter period of time than will smaller media. There are many media options (such as online video sharing sites or advertising in digital games) that will never produce 100% reach no matter how many weeks on air or dollars marketers devote to it.

4. Consider the value of high reach media: expensive media can be good value

The continuous reach planning approach favors big media such as TV and print since these media deliver high reach quickly and cost-efficiently— they are vast and fast. However, there may be value in adding other media to the campaign (such as online or radio), even if it isn’t as cost effective in CPM. The important consideration is not just about CPM, but whether it can lift cumulative reach across weeks. That is, what is the CPM of the incremental reach delivered. For example, there may be a small group of people who are terribly hard to reach with TV, but who can be reached with another media (like outdoor). Media that skew to difficult-to-reach viewers (e.g. younger consumers) are therefore particularly valuable. However, if you see no evidence that a smaller audience or higher CPM media actually achieves this, then just buy whatever media delivers reach most cost effectively. Be especially wary of media sales pitches that claim to deliver specialist audiences.

Concentrate on the absolute reach of the entire product category that a vehicle delivers, not on the profile of a vehicle’s audience.

It is not very important that a given media vehicle, such as a specialist magazine, has a readership comprised entirely (or, mostly) of a specialist audience. What is much more important is the absolute reach of all product category buyers that a media vehicle delivers. As an example, a newsletter that has an audience of only 100 people, but who are all highly interested in the product category is less useful than another medium that delivers 1,000 of the specialist audience even if it’s amongst a more diverse overall audience.

It is dangerous to buy media based purely on CPM, as such a buying policy typically results in lots of low reach media – which ensures that an advertiser ends up talking only to those consumers who are very easy to reach (e.g. the unemployed).

High rating programs and big newspaper or magazine editions are particularly valuable because they reach more of the target market, but also tend to reach more light viewers/ readers than do smaller vehicles (see our Report 55 on the Light TV Viewer).

Of course, not all advertisers can afford a prime-time spot on the highest rating TV show, but the principle remains the same – buy the biggest reach media you can afford and assemble a combination of spots or media that delivers cumulative reach over time.

5. Minimize the gap between exposure and purchase

Perhaps one of the most sobering thoughts in media planning is considering what period of time between purchase occasion and ad exposure would be acceptable to you. All advertisers would like this gap to only be a few minutes, but that would be impossible to achieve (let alone afford).

How long a gap can you accept? When we go completely off-air for a period we guarantee a gap for every single potential customer. A week off-air adds one more week to whenever each person last saw your ad. Similarly, when we gain low reach in a period we create an ‘off-air’ gap for those whom we did not reach – say an advertiser gains only 5% reach in a single week, this then ensures that for 95% of the consumers another week is added to the period since they last saw an ad for the brand. Finally, if we fail to gain incremental reach then we repeatedly miss out some people, whose gap increases further.

Use the length of this gap in exposures as a metric to guide your media buy. Take a period like a year, and calculate what is the maximum gap each buyer will ever experience between any two exposures to your advertising, given your advertising budget and current media plan. There will be some consumers in the market (e.g. heavy TV viewers) who will see most of your advertising, so the longest gap between exposures for them will be quite small; ignore this group. Instead, look at the 10% who have the longest gap for these people. Now, adjust the media plan to make this gap as short as possible. If you have a large budget, and can afford to buy media vehicles where it is possible to gain very high reach cheaply, then you’ll be able to achieve a very short minimum gap. Whatever size your budget is your aim is to minimise this gap.

Note: Don’t use average frequency to calculate the gap. Average frequency hides the fact that many consumers saw less than the average and hides what the maximum gap is.

CATEGORY PURCHASE CYCLES

Shorter category purchase cycles don’t necessarily mean that you have to advertise more often, and longer purchase cycles don’t mean you can get away with longer gaps between advertising exposure. What matters is the amount of sales being made each week and the rate of decay of advertising’s effect on memories. Consider a product category like plumbing—the average inter-purchase cycle might be 12 months, but each day some households will call a plumber. When any particular household does so will occur in an as-if random manner, you might be unlucky enough to have to call a plumber twice this month. Sales are being made each and every week and therefore a continuous planning schedule that maximises reach and minimises the gap between ad exposure and sale is the best approach.

As long as there is memory decay of advertising messages, brands can’t tolerate large gaps between their advertising exposures. In categories where the recency effects are strong, marketers will see immediate sales effects from turning advertising on and off, which is why such categories feature a lot of advertising, even for seldom purchased items, e.g. carpets. In most other categories the memory effects of advertising lasts a while (depending the volume of competitor advertising) but this is not a reason for long hiatuses without advertising, it just means that you can have some gap between each exposure to your advertising – which is good because no one has an infinite budget. Whatever the case the aim should be still to buy the shortest gap your budget can afford.

CONCLUDING NOTE

The better reach you gain, the faster it cumulates each week, and the more evenly you space your exposures then the shorter the ‘out of sight–out of mind’ period any consumer will ever experience for your brand.

We emphasise that planning for reach means spending any media budget more wisely – no matter what its size. All marketers are under pressure to either cut their advertising budget or to better spend the budget that they have. Therefore, no marketer can ‘afford’ to not maximize reach and coverage over time. The intelligent spacing of advertising is a key consideration for every marketer, no matter how small your budget – because each additional GRP spent this month is one GRP you can’t spend next month.

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