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Choosing Advertising Media to Support Marketing Strategy
Business Essentials · Chapter 16: Integrated Marketing Communications and AdvertisingSection 16.4 · lesson 75 of 10513 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Where and when a message runs decides who ever sees it.
- Describe the media categories and their traits
- Explain reach, frequency, GRP, and CPM
- Match scheduling patterns to purchase patterns
- Evaluate a media plan against its objective
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Integrated Marketing Communications and Advertising
Choosing Advertising Media to Support Marketing Strategy
A brilliant advertisement can fail completely, simply by running in the wrong place. This section is about media planning, the decisions about where and when a message appears. We'll survey the media categories, and the characteristics that decide whether one fits. Then the core planning measures. Reach, frequency, gross rating points, and cost per thousand. We'll look at effective frequency, fragmentation, and three ways to schedule spending over time. Then two traps. Wastage, and the pull of whatever is easiest to measure. We'll finish with buying, evaluating a plan, and a marketer who trusted the cleanest number in his report. That last trap is easy to fall into, and hard to notice from the inside.
What Media Planning Is
Where and When, Not What
Media planning is deciding where and when to place messages. It's a different task from creating the message itself, which we covered in the previous section. Hold onto one point from the start. A strong message in the wrong medium reaches nobody it was meant for. An excellent ad running where the audience never looks accomplishes exactly as little, as a poor ad running everywhere. In both cases, the people it was built to persuade never see it. Five characteristics decide how well a medium fits a need. First, the audience it reaches must overlap with the campaign's target. Otherwise nothing else about it matters. Second, targeting, how precisely the message can be aimed at the right people. Third, cost per thousand, the price of reaching a given volume of that audience. Fourth, the message length and complexity it can carry. And fifth, measurability, how confidently you can tell whether the placement worked.
Table 16.4.1
Broadcast, Print, Out-of-Home, Direct
The media are described by structure, not by today's popular platforms, which change too fast to list. Broadcast, meaning television and radio, offers very broad reach, and rich sound and moving images. It's priced by the size of audience delivered, with low targeting precision and limited measurability. Print, meaning newspapers and magazines, offers a defined, often demographically distinct readership. It can carry more detailed text, and its reach is declining, but still meaningful in many categories. Targeting is moderate, through the publication's known readership profile. Out-of-home means billboards and transit advertising. It reaches anyone passing a specific location, and it's priced by location and traffic. A passing viewer has only seconds, so message capacity is tiny, and targeting stops at the location. Direct media, such as mail to individually identified addresses, offer precise targeting to named recipients. They can carry a long, detailed message, but the cost per contact is comparatively high.
Table 16.4.1
Digital, Social, Audio, Owned
Digital display and search offer fine-grained targeting, based on user behavior and search intent. They're strongly measurable, and often priced on actual engagement, like clicks, rather than simple exposure. Social platforms target on declared and inferred interests. They suit short, shareable content, and they measure engagement well. But the dominant platforms change over time. Audio, meaning streaming and podcast placements, reaches an engaged listening audience, with moderate measurability. And owned media, the business's own website, app, or platform, has no direct cost per exposure. The catch, as before, is that the business has to build its own audience. Look across all eight, and no medium scores well on every column. So choosing media means matching a combination of strengths to what the campaign needs. It doesn't mean picking whatever is fashionable, or whatever the planner happens to know best.
Figure 16.4.1
Reach Against Frequency, on a Fixed Budget
Two terms sit at the center of media planning. Reach is the proportion of the target audience exposed to a message at least once. Frequency is the average number of times that audience is exposed. On a fixed budget, the two trade off directly. Buying exposure to a larger share of the audience usually means showing it to each person fewer times. Concentrating on repeated exposure to a narrower group raises frequency, at the cost of reach. The figure draws that trade as three shapes of equal area, the same budget each time. On the left, broad and thin. On the right, narrow and deep. So the real question is whether the campaign needs many people once, or fewer people several times. And remember wearout. Frequency pushed past the wearout point is spending against your own interest. Raise frequency only as far as the message and audience can productively absorb, not as high as the budget allows.
GRP and CPM
Planning Measures, Worked Through
Two planning measures summarize a plan. Gross rating points, or GRP, is reach multiplied by frequency. It gives one number for the total weight of a plan, but hides how much came from reach versus frequency. Cost per thousand, or CPM, is the cost of reaching one thousand audience members. You calculate it as total cost, divided by the audience size in thousands. It's the standard way to compare the price efficiency of different placements. Here's a worked example, with figures constructed for the exercise. A fictional business, Verano Coffee, is weighing two placements. Placement one costs eight thousand dollars, and reaches four hundred thousand people, twice each on average. Eight thousand divided by four hundred gives a CPM of twenty dollars. Placement two costs five thousand dollars, and reaches two hundred thousand people, also twice each. Five thousand divided by two hundred gives a CPM of twenty-five dollars. So placement one costs more in total, but it's more efficient per person reached. That's why CPM, not total cost, is the right basis for comparing placements of different sizes.
Planning Realities
No Magic Number, and No Single Channel
Effective frequency is the number of exposures believed necessary before a message works on a typical audience member. The honest statement is that research supports no single magic number. Industry discussion sometimes proposes a rule of thumb. But the number that actually works varies with how novel or familiar the message is. It varies with how engaged the audience already is with the category, and with where wearout falls. So treat effective frequency as something to estimate and test for each campaign, not a constant to look up. The second reality is media fragmentation. Audience attention is now divided across a growing number of outlets and platforms. None of them commands the share of attention that a few dominant outlets once did. The practical consequence is that matching the reach one medium once delivered now takes several categories combined.
Scheduling Patterns
Match Spending to the Purchase Pattern
Spending over time follows one of three scheduling patterns, each matched to a purchase pattern. Continuity spreads spending evenly across the whole planning period. It fits products bought fairly steadily all year, where there's no reason to concentrate spending. Flighting concentrates spending into defined bursts, separated by periods of no spending at all. It fits seasonal or occasion-driven products. Spending in the off-period would mostly reach people who aren't in the market to buy. Pulsing combines the two. It keeps a low, continuous baseline all period, and adds heavier bursts in specific peak windows. It fits products with steady underlying demand, plus predictable peak occasions layered on top. That way it captures continuous presence and concentrated peak emphasis at the same time.
Targeting vs. Wastage
Cheap Contacts Can Be Expensive
Wastage is exposure delivered to people outside the target audience. It's spending with no useful effect, because the message reaches someone it was never meant to persuade. That creates a trade-off worth naming directly. Highly targeted media can cost more per contact than broad, untargeted media. Yet they can still waste less overall. A higher price for a contact who is actually in the target audience, can be the better use of money. A lower price can buy contacts that are mostly outside it. So cost per contact and cost efficiency are not the same measure. Compare only the cheaper number per contact, and you can build a plan that looks efficient on paper. And that plan can still perform poorly in practice.
The Measurability Asymmetry
Measurable Is Not the Same as Effective
There's a real and consequential measurability asymmetry between media. Digital media can often track engagement and response precisely. Broadcast and out-of-home are much harder to measure directly. That creates a genuine planning distortion, so let's state it plainly. A business can be tempted to shift budget toward what's most measurable, rather than what's most effective. The measurable channel produces a clean, reportable number. An equally effective, or more effective, channel produces no comparably clean figure. So a dollar better spent building broad awareness can drift into a highly measurable digital channel. Not because evidence shows it works better, but because its results are easier to report and defend. This is a real distortion in how budgets get allocated, not a hypothetical risk. A channel's measurability is not, by itself, evidence that it works better.
Buying and Evaluating
From Plan to Placement to Verdict
Media buying is the process of actually purchasing the placements a plan calls for. That includes negotiating rates. Published prices are often just a starting point, especially for larger volumes. Many businesses work through an outside media agency, which plans and buys across many clients. An agency often has negotiating leverage and market knowledge a single business couldn't easily build. The mechanics of buying and agency pay are a specialized area, so they're only named here. Finally, how do you judge a finished plan? Against the campaign objective, with its audience, response, funnel stage, measure, and timeframe. A plan with strong reach and a good CPM hasn't succeeded, if its audience is only loosely related to the target. And a plan built on the most measurable channel hasn't necessarily succeeded, just because its result is clean. Success means delivering the response the objective called for, not whichever number looks best in isolation.
Case Vignette
The Cleanest Number in the Report
Here's a composite case, built for instruction. The company and the person are fictional. Devon, a marketing manager at Thistledown Outdoor Gear, sets a balanced media plan. Broadcast provides broad reach, and digital search provides measurable, near-term response. After a month, his report shows clear, precise click and conversion numbers from search. Broadcast's contribution is far harder to state with any comparable precision. So Devon shifts most of the remaining budget into search. Its results are the ones he can see. Over the next months, overall sales growth slows, even though the search numbers still look strong. His team suspects broadcast had been building the awareness that fed the search results in the first place. He can keep favoring search, restore some broadcast, or commission research on broadcast's real contribution. The constraint is that search will always report more cleanly than broadcast, whatever each truly achieves. Devon mistook a difference in how cleanly channels report for a difference in how well they work. The sound decision is to commission the research first, such as testing markets with and without broadcast. Only then can he tell whether the channel with the cleanest numbers is really doing the most work.
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