WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE SKY

Project Apollo Promises a New Look at Media

By Erwin Ephron

I remember being at a new business meeting where Carl Ally, Detroit adman by training, expressed the creative agency’s suspicion of media science.

"And now let’s look at the research." He said as he winked knowingly at the dealer group seated around the table, “That’s where the Rubber meets the sky.”

There’s been a lot of buzz about Apollo, the new research joint venture of Arbitron and VNU being championed by P&G. Past the Lion and the Lamb biblical commentary, buzz does not usually punctuate research. Glazed eyes do.

How is Apollo different from the research bits we squint at in the trades everyday? Or better said, “What can Apollo tell us that we really, really want to know?“

Apollo is a “single-source” study where media exposure and brand purchase are monitored in the same household. (Monitoring is a lot better than questioning, because people forget and make things up.) Single source lets us track the effects of advertising on purchase, by comparing the purchase behavior of households that receive the advertising compared to similar households that do not.

The important thing about monitored single-source is we’ve done it before and it changed the way we plan media. It’s the story of Recency planning.

From Effective Frequency to Recency

In the US TV advertising tradition, starting from the early days of Ted Bates and Rosser Reeves in the 1960’s was the hammer. “Pound the message in again and again until they get it.” This was during a period of a growing economy, a rising standard of living and more and more people learning to be consumers.

The research of Krugman and others supported the idea that repeating messages was essential for commercials to be learned, to be remembered and to sell. It was called “effective frequency planning.” And for decades following, TV continued to be thought of as a teaching medium, even though consumers and consumption were changing.

Then in 1995, Professor John Philip Jones of Syracuse University wrote a book titled “When Ads Work.” It presented a remarkable contrarian conclusion: Jones found that “Within the week, a single TV exposure was enough to produce a strong purchase effect, and that subsequent exposures within that week, added very little.”

This was the birth of Recency and an entirely new direction in the way we think about planning media.

Recency explained that advertising seemed to influence the purchase decisions of that small group of people who were in the market for the product at the time. This moved planning away from a teaching to a skimming model and made reach and continuity, not frequency, the keys to media planning. Recency revolutionized advertising practice.

Recency Used Single-Source Data

The point of this digression is the Jones research was based on single-source data collected in 1991-1992 by an experimental Nielsen HomeScan panel equipped with TV set meters.

If this was NASA, we might call the HomeScan experiment, Apollo One.

Since in the past, Apollo-like single-source data have dramatically changed the way we think about how advertising works, I would like to speculate briefly, about a few new things we might ask Apollo to tell us.

One pressing question is the effect of commercial avoidance. “How many of a program’s attentive viewers are being delivered to today’s commercials?”

Current audience measurements don’t tell us. But TiVo, falling attentiveness and recall scores, ROI modeling and observing our own viewing behavior, warn that the commercial TV model is in trouble.

Apollo data relating TV and radio exposure patterns to brand purchase (with Outdoor and Print added in time) will help us reassess the value of frequency and help us to recalibrate the ratings.

In practical terms we may need a frequency of two today to achieve an old John Philip Jones frequency of one. An easy idea to swallow, apart from the cost.

From Reach to Synergy

And cost pushes us right into media mix. We think of other media, Radio, Print, Outdoor, Internet even Cinema, as a way to increase the reach of a TV schedule.

We may want to think more about using them to increase frequency. And that leads us to media synergy. The fascinating idea that it is the interaction and timing of messages, Print amplifying TV, Outdoor extending Radio. Newspapers and Internet punctuating campaigns, that is important in making advertising more effective.

People can argue that research seldom changes the way we do business. That’s true only if we have no important questions. Single source research like Apollo can change the way the business thinks about advertising and the way it spends dollars.

And it can happen quickly. The switch to Recency planning took only five years.

When Carl Ally joked “Research is where the rubber meets the sky.” I like to believe he really meant “and that’s the only limit.”

- November 8, 2004 -

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