The saddest thing about anyone who has been in the media planning business less than 10 years is that they believe reach and frequency numbers are real. Or maybe they think that all the Telmar and IMS models are derived from fairly recent samples of reach and frequency based on real schedules. Poor deluded kids.
Little do they know that these delivery numbers hark back to a report no longer generated by Nielsen called the Brand Cume Analysis where you could actually find your network schedules’ delivery numbers. Real delivery numbers! That would have been in the days before we had more than three networks and cable was a glint in Ted Turner’s eye. These reports were so reliable that used them to doublecheck that our network schedules had run as ordered.
But I digress. Suffice to say that these days, reach and frequency as found in any syndicated software is about as real as Santa Claus.
So you can imagine my horror at the insistence of folks who wish to develop reach and frequency for internet buys. Why, why, why? We only used these delivery numbers as we had nothing better to work with. I cannot count the hours senior agency executives spent trying to equate reach and frequency to something that had real meaning – like ROI or sales. We took results from old case histories and tried to project those results with little success. We related effective reach to awareness goals – neither one of these metrics was what our clients were interested in. They were inerested in how our media plan was going to produce sales.
With internet able to provide much richer and more meaningful sales metrics than broadcast or print today, why would anyone want to go back to the research stone ages?
Why don’t we require that broadcast come up with similar metrics rather than drag internet into an antiquated system. It seems that every digital conference I attend has this question pop up at least once “We need reach and frequency so we can compete with broadcast.”
No, we don’t.
