How TV Ratings Can Help You Understand the ROI of Digital: Measuring “Likes” (Part 1)
The transcript of a presentation I created explaining a framework for understanding what businesses get out of digital platforms.
In my day-to-day work as a “digital strategist”, I meet many business owners who are anxious around “digital data” and “digital objectives”.
As a researcher, I’m curious about it too, even when I look at my own habits.
Case in point:
I know that “Top of Mind”, is important for marketers and businesses. So is “BUMO” — Brand Used Most Often. Does having a social media account really influence these two?
My Top of Mind brand for clothing purchase is Forever 21. I didn’t even realize that until I started writing this post. I don’t follow Forever 21 on any social network. But I think of them EVERY time I think of buying a shirt.
Zara is my second “spontaneous awareness” brand for clothes, and I don’t follow it on any social network either. I follow Vans Girls on Instagram and McDonalds, and I buy them. I follow Oreo on Instagram, too. Because I’ve always loved eating them and their account is amusing.
Given all this, is there really a correlation between following a brand online and sales?
As a business owner, how would I measure what value my digital properties bring? Does it matter to the bottom-line?
Those are the kinds of questions I want to start clarifying here.
The world is shifting
…And people tend to panic. I’ve witnessed big corporate leaders from different backgrounds trying to understand how “digital” is going to affect their business. I’ve seen the siren song of buzzwords being thrown around — mobile, social, responsive, native, user-centered — until they didn’t mean anything to me anymore.
I just want to help give people a bit of peace regarding where their money could be going. I hate it when people panic because of too little or unclear information.
I want people to have a clear picture (as much as we can accurately say) of how “digital” affects a business in a nation with only approximately 30% internet penetration.
First, the “facts”: Limited reach
Since 2011, reports often said that the Philippines has 33% Internet penetration (Now, they say it’s close to 50%). I’m not saying this is wrong, I just want to be a realist. This figure comes from a Nielsen study, sampled nationwide among urban key areas*.
Google, using their standard measure of Internet reach, estimates the reach of the Internet in the Philippines at 19.8 million. That’s 20% of the estimated 2014 population. Which may make sense, because half of the Philippines live in rural areas, outside the reach of a typical market research survey sample.
- There are reasons for this. The data isn’t wrong, and I’m not bashing the market research community, because I’m a market researcher myself. It just costs way too much money to spread a sample size too much. That’s the trade-off.
To be safe, I just keep in mind the 19.8 million figure to talk about the reach of the Internet in the Philippines.
Now. Why even advertise on something that only reaches 20% of a population, when I can put money into TV which is present in over 90% of Philippine homes?
*Honestly, I’m not trying to sell you “digital”, it just makes me sad when people don’t fully understand what they’re paying for. Business owners should know where their money is going.
Plus, I believe you can’t maximize what you can’t comprehend.
Advantages of Broadcast Advertising: The more, the merrier
I used to work with TV ratings data. Every day, we monitored the movement of at least 20 different TV shows each, on 3 main channels. We did minute-by-minute viewers’ flow reports so that we could optimize and maximize the strength of the TV shows.
Brands normally pay a premium for a 15-second TV commercial slot in a high-viewership time, or a timeslot that is skewed towards their target audience.
BUT you pay for it without knowing whether the people you target actually saw it. You pay for the probability of your target audience getting a glimpse of your commercial.
You don’t even know whether they understood it, or remember it. As long as you put it out there for the possibility of that 90% of Filipino homes to see. Awareness.
So you pay, let’s say:
P500,000 for a 30-second spot in the mid-afternoon or late evening slot, averaging 15% national viewership. (Just sample figures) = The money you spend per person: P500,000 / (97M*15%) = P0.03 / person.
Specifically, for the possibility that those 14 million people might be looking at the TV screen during the 15 seconds your commercial is airing.
In actuality, they could have switched channels, gone to the bathroom, talked to their husband, but you pay for the potential.
That 3 centavos per person. That’s the Cost of Attention.
It’s Reach + Potential and Indefinite Awareness.
This is why Broadcast and TV are still best for “reach” and “brand awareness”. Reaching 14M people at, say, a few centavos per person is a good deal.
What is digital good for then?
The USP (Unique Selling Point) of Digital
Digital is busy. The users’ attention is torn, and the web is so wide that it’s hard to figure out how your brand can stand out among all the other content online (cute kitties, touching Upworthy videos, showbiz articles, fashion shots on Instagram, selfies from your friends, chat messages).
And when you’ve paid so much to be on TV, what does a “Like” mean to a brand? What does being “on social” or “on digital” mean for a business?
In my heart, I’ve long been uneasy about the value of social media. For businesses, in particular. Going back to the question I posed at the beginning: As a business owner, how would I measure the value that my digital properties bring?
To answer that, let’s examine how we measure the value of TV commercials. On TV, effectivity is measured by the number of people who “KNOW” about it (awareness), which is perfect for the strength of TV.
That cost is how much you’re willing to pay for awareness.
Well, how much does it matter to you that people give your brand a concrete show of support?
Measurable affinity
That’s where the real value of a “Like” comes in. It directly says that someone looked at what you said and he agreed, approved or was amused by it. “Like”.*
Typically, following the strength of brand affinity, the most noble goal would then be an organic “share”. At the end of the day social media or digital media is still “media”, a type of medium or channel. It is about content, and content marketing.
A person sharing something about your brand (without you telling them to), tells you — the brand owner — one thing: that he or she saw the content (brand awareness), understood what it said (comprehension — equity), and not only agreed with it (“like”/approval — preference), but found it relevant to or worthy of telling friends or having it come from her (relevance and personal association — affinity).
This is why it’s also the highest goal of “viral” content publishers like Buzzfeed and Upworthy. So much so that they already have “rules” and best practices just for shareable headline creation.
Where does commenting fall, then? It depends on the quality of conversation you’re after. What kind of conversations would you want people to have around your brand — that would dictate the value of comments.
Don’t just take my word for it, Avinash Kaushik, Google’s former Analytics Evangelist and current Digital Marketing evangelist talks about a similar funnel of measurement on his site — conversation, amplification and applause rates.
The Google payment models for paid search and display ads also inherently reward digital effectiveness — pay-per-click, not impressions. Interaction, not awareness.
My goal for today is to present a one-glance view of how we can begin to wrap our heads around how exactly digital matters, in terms of advertising.
In the next days, I will talk more about how this model impacts the measurement and ethics of digital marketing. Feel free to share your own thoughts about this, too. How does your business value or quantify the value of digital?
Tomorrow: Measurement — Quality of Interaction, over Universal Number
