Interactive Media Planning

There is no doubt that mass media are gradually being eroded in favour of many niche or narrowly focused media; digital TV channels or websites can successfully concentrate on minority audiences especially as production costs are lower (D. Pickton 2001). Developments in telecommunications, electronics and computing are now ushering in a new era and have created new avenues for marketing communication. The term ‘New Media’ is therefore a coinage to reflect these new opportunities.

‘New Media’ may be deliberately vague; they include the full range of emerging media alternatives such as digital and interactive TV, global satellite TV, teletext and videotext, the WWW and the Internet, CD-ROM, DVD, Video and multimedia. While Hugh Cannon of Wayne University believes that measurement is relatively easy in
interactive media, there are others who single out the Internet and posit that it is far from the perfectly measurable medium people claim even though it is more accurate than all other media (R. Zeff and B. Aronson 1999).

The Internet is really not one medium but a collection of media (Wells and Chen 2000) used by different kinds of people (Wells and Chen 1999; Rodgers and Cannon 2000) for very different reasons (Stafford and Stafford 1998; Korgaonkor and Wollin 1999; Rodgers and Sheldon 1999).

Soon consumers will no longer pay for circulation because publishers and advertisers will ‘incentivize’ them to visit their sites, browse ads and download information. Direct response is now all about making information available to consumers and getting them to request it. In the same vein the old rule that 3 x frequency is needed to ‘break through’ is being altered. With interactive, online and Internet advertising, emphasis is on making consumers an offer they cannot refuse.

In interactive media, reps do not call the buyer; buyers must not only search out availabilities listings and directories, but it is imperative that they are astute in sorting out which sites to consider of the very many which accept advertising. The media planner will therefore need to be part detective and part librarian cataloging sites of interest and tracking them to see if they will turn out to be worthy of consideration.

The form your ad will take may not be certain because in the world of interactive media you are closer than ever to the “medium being the message.” The easy way out producing a 30-second TV spot or a page four-colour bleed print ad, and then figuring out where to run it will soon be over for Nigeria’s ad industry (Smith 2002). As a media planner in the interactive world you must evaluate each new medium based on the potential of the technology and its limitations.

New media play highly differentiated roles in the allocation of the various IMC tasks; IMC messages that rely on conscious consumer information processing evaluation are believed to be best delivered in media environments like the Internet. Cannon is of the view that hit rates and click through do not really tell the site manager what proportion is actually in the target market for different products that might advertise on the site. It is not enough to consider whether people hit on a b2c direct-response website; what matters most is whether the hit really results in a consumer response.

Planning media in the interactive world requires familiarization with some terms that can be found in website analysis reports, e.g. ‘Ad request,’ ‘Ad view,’ ‘ Click through’ ‘Exposures,’ ‘Hit,’ ‘Impressions,’ ‘Page view,’ ‘Response rate,’ ‘Visitor,’ ‘Visit,’ etc.
Web measurement is the timely tracking of all activity on any particular site; when advertisers consider a site for ad placements the advertisers want to know about the site’s traffic and ask questions like, “how many page views does the site have every week,” etc.

The following are tips on interactive media buying as suggested by Michelle Ellis of M2k a top-100 interactive agency: 1. to media buyers unsold inventory means there may be a lot of room for negotiation; 2. if most of the publisher’s revenue comes from ad sales the planner should note that there is plenty room for negotiation; 3. buyers need not be afraid of letting the publisher’s rep know where his site stands against the competition; 4. sites which use ad auctions are predisposed to get rid of unsold inventory at low rates; 5. buyers must compare network with publisher; 6. how long the publisher has been accepting advertising is also key; 7. how much money the publisher spends marketing the site is equally important; 8. how much or how little a publisher values its audience must be noted by the buyer; 9. it is imperative that the status of the publisher is known, e.g. privately owned company or public; 10. Back-end metrics and renegotiation should as well be noted, e.g. the buyer should be able to tell within two weeks whether a site should continue to be a buy or not.

At the 2001 Revolution Awards ceremony in New York, Avenue A, a digital marketing agency won the “Best Online Media Planning and Placement” category for its work with Drugstore.com. For the campaign Avenue A had used its Web Affinity Analysis, a behaviour-based planning tool, to identify customers with a high probability to visit Drugstore.com. This impressive digital media technology identifies high-affinity websites, i.e. those with a high concentration of valuable customers.

Customers identified were those with the propensity to visit and purchase at Drugstore.com. The analysis was able to blend website traffic data with anonymous Internet-wide surfing behaviour to learn where Drugstore.com’s most active customers spend time on the Internet, and to show the sites that would drive the most conversions. Avenue A succeeded in identifying 17 sites that delivered customers who were 10 times more likely to buy than low-affinity sites. Coupled with that, Avenue A developed a list of 1.45 million high-quality prospects for Drugstore.com, as well as identify a new site genre that delivered 43% of sales for a mere 32% of budget (Quantitative Inc. 1998-2003).

In the ‘New Media’ World media planners will have to maximize the potential return on online media buying and selling and device ways of reaching target audiences effectively. They will conduct competitive analyses, apply media reach and frequency planning tools to campaign planning, perform pre- and post-buying analyses, and determine new business partnerships for cross-promotional advertising. Online advertising is not just for the Internet anymore because organizations can now use their intranets and extranets to sell corporate programmes (Zeff and Aronson).

Opportunities for media planners should be limitless!