Reach & frequency in the age of outcomes
History
Since the 1950s, measuring your TV advertising meant estimating the number of people who saw your ad. Starting in the 1960s, Media Mix Modeling became popular as a way to tie aggregate spend on different advertising channels with sales, to allow a brand to calculate the best mix for their business. With the rise of digital advertising, additional techniques for measurement of sales like Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) and Sales Lift were added to the marketer’s toolbox. In addition, outcomes further up the funnel became measurable. Attention is furthest up the funnel, measuring whether a consumer paid attention to or engaged with an ad. Brand lift measures changes in attitudes, including metrics like consideration. Location lift or visit lift measures increases in foot traffic to physical locations like retail stores or car dealerships. Search lift measures the increase in search activity for a brand after an ad airs.
Why reach still matters
With all of these types of outcomes able to be measured by modern marketers, it is natural to wonder why we still talk about reach and frequency at all. After all, if the point of the campaign is to drive sales (or foot traffic or consideration, etc.), it is natural to wonder why we measure the mere delivery of the campaign.
In its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was tasked with keeping as many Americans as possible safe from the virus. When effective vaccines were developed, the job was not done. In order to save lives, the vaccine had to make its way into as many arms as possible. There were ad campaigns, giveaways, and much more to try to convince the public to get the vaccine. The reason is obvious. If you want to protect as many people as possible, you need an effective vaccine, but then you also need to give it to as many people as possible.
This is not unlike what happens with an advertising campaign. First, the creative agency makes creative that is as influential as possible. Next, the media agency needs to use this creative to influence as many relevant people as possible. In addition, the effectiveness of a campaign flattens with an increase in frequency. That is, showing twice as many impressions to a single person does not make the campaign twice as likely to impact that person, yet it is twice as expensive. As such, controlling reach and frequency is essential for optimizing on a cost-per-person-impacted basis.
The role of Linear TV
Discussions about reach should start with discussions of Linear TV. Linear TV is still an important channel for advertisers, but as the linear TV audience shrinks, its frequency problem worsens. Once a TV spot is sent over the air, the chips fall where they may. Many smart advertisers have a total video strategy to manage this problem. The good news is that there has never been more linear TV data available, such as Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), making it easier to construct a digital and CTV strategy that complements the linear buy.
Lean in to predictions
Marketers know that planning a campaign in today’s fragmented media landscape is difficult. However, using modern Machine Learning, marketers can model who is likely to see an ad on different channels, and add them to a suppression audience to prevent excess frequency. This is especially powerful when linear TV is in the mix. If the ad is shown to a different group than predicted, the hold out group can always be removed later in the campaign. Managing frequency in this way from the start of the campaign prevents distribution problems later on.
Optimizing reach using Snowflake
Snowflake is an ideal platform for a modern marketer to use to manage reach. Snowflake easily scales to handle advertising data at the impression level, making the kinds of queries used easy to write and run. In addition, Data Clean Rooms on Snowflake are becoming the preferred way for publishers to make impression data available to advertisers. An advertiser can even use a Multiparty Data Clean Room to understand incremental reach across multiple publishers without any of them exposing personal information.
Conclusion
Despite outcome measurement being more important, and accessible, than ever before, reach and frequency remain valuable metrics for marketers to measure and manage. Fortunately, marketers have data and tools available to them to prevent waste in their media plan.
