SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION OF ADVERTISING AGE

Marketers Wanted

The media buying and planning role is changing dramatically. In fact, that role might be better described with a new title By Steve Greenberger/DJG Marketing

There is little doubt that the idea of building a media plan with a good demo, a budget, an objective and a nice optimization tool is a thing of the past.

Today, media planners and buyers must be thoroughly versed in the proliferation of new media alternatives. They also need to understand the limits of the research they are using and have some insight into how their target consumers use the media they select.

But their task doesn’t end there. Media planners and buyers must understand the creative

message and its relevance to each selected media vehicle. They need a sense of how engaged the audience will be with this message and of how to take advantage of the asset pool of each media company they approach. Their goal is to build relevant, effective and efficient package deals while delivering a very attractive return on investment for the advertiser.

Needless to say, the role of today’s media planners and buyers is changing dramatically. In fact, their role might better be described with a new title: marketer.

After all, these individuals must be able to go way beyond selecting and buying impressions and to understand who the consumers of a product or service really are, what will motivate them,

where and when they can be reached most successfully and how to follow them through the various stages of the purchase cycle.

The problem, unfortunately, is that these marketers work at a disadvantage. Since most media and full-service agencies eliminated their market research staffs years ago, much of the analysis that agency marketers need currently only goes past the desks of “media” research people. This means that all of those metrics for effectiveness and “ affec-tiveness” get interpreted by a media-skewed eye.

This is one reason the subject of engagement has gotten so tiring, with its measures mired in the question of how engaging each media vehicle is instead of how engaging

the advertisement is in the first place.

Agency marketers need more ad-testing results across media to get a handle on which media work best, where, when and how often. ROI is not just a post-analysis measure. It requires plenty of preplanning study and analysis, too.

Marketers also need to be armed with better research on who the consumer is. They cannot be satisfied with just finding a demographic target to reach. They must have a clear understanding of the consumer’s DNA, lifestyle, mind-set and mind-style (how they see themselves) to successfully home in on the media they will be involved with and influenced by.

What’s more, marketers who are building

media plans must be in total sync with any other group building a portion of the plan. Digital or “new” media are often planned separately from traditional media. This creates havoc for media companies looking to sell a cross-media package, and it may also produce a much less integrated plan, or an “off-key” component, to an otherwise solid campaign.

Cross-media packages, in fact, are critical in a 360° marketing world. Marketers must maintain a very clear understanding of the broad asset pool of the media companies that they are looking to utilize. They must look at these assets for their relevance as well as their reach delivery, and they should determine how to incorporate these potential

packages into their campaign before starting to plan.

Above all, agency marketers must start with an organizing idea that meets a client’s brand objectives and can be clearly conveyed to a media vendor.

The marketer’s role is highly complex. It is likely to evolve into a very attractive one, too, as agency structures and philosophy change to incorporate it over time. o

Steve Greenberger is senior VP-chief strategic marketing officer at DJG Marketing, a full-service marketing service firm that provides media companies with strategic positioning, research, ad sales development and communications. He can be reached at steveg@ djgmarketing.com.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Researchers wait for a single measurement currency to help compare and contrast different media By Wayne Karrfalt

The idea of comparing usage data across different types of media has been a dream of media researchers for years. Lately, however, the goal, once called “fusion research,” has become a moving target.

“It’s just so difficult to compare across different media types,” says David Ernst, exec VP-director of futures and technologies at Initiative. “Silos of information exist that focus precisely on one medium, and there are precious few resources that bring them together in an agreed-upon fashion.”

Zenith Optimedia uses Simmons behavioral graphics in conjunction with Nielsen household databases and a third-party processor in an effort to get beyond simple age, sex and other basic demographics. “The biggest obstacle now is that it can get really expensive,” says Bruce Goerlich, the company’s exec VP-director of strategic resources. “Hopefully as it’s done more and more, costs will come down.”

NEW INITIATIVES

There are reasons to be optimistic that more sophisticated tools will be made available to the general media market as major research firms try to step up to the plate. Nielsen’s ambitious Anytime, Anywhere Media Measurement initiative, or A2/M2, is

setting out to measure video on multiple devices, including PCs, iPods, cell phones and out-of-home TV.

“Nielsen’s philosophy of following the video is absolutely right,” says Susan Nathan, research director at Universal McCann. “IPods need to be measured alongside TV viewing because broadcast networks are allowing access to their content on the Web, and we need to know how many people will actually be watching this.”

Meanwhile, other companies already have products out there in the market that do some of the things that Nielsen is promising. Buzz Metrics measures blogs and other consumer-gener-ated content. M: Metrics measures mobile content consumption. Erin Media, TNS Media Intelligence, Everstream and Rentrack pull data from set-top boxes to study exact programming and commercial behavior patterns.

Researchers say these products offer interesting insights, and their existence in the marketplace will help spur Nielsen along.

The evolution from active to passive, single screen to multiscreen, impression to impact is most likely to occur if these companies work together, researchers say. For instance, Project Apollo—a collaboration announced in January between Arbitron, VNU and six national advertisers to collect multimedia purchase data from a common sample of con-

sumers—is seen as a step in the right direction.

PRIORITY ISSUES

The issue now seems to be one of prioritization. With viable methods arising to measure newer platforms and more accurate tools being tested to measure the older ones, they must be studied, perfected and accepted before the data they produce can be synthesized, says Debbie Solomon, senior partner and group research director at MindShare.

“Trying to measure these new media has become a bigger topic,” she says. “We have to figure out how to measure them first, then we’ll figure out how to combine them later.”

Nielsen is focused on just this at the moment. In mid-October the company announced the rosters of A2/M2 client advisory committees to study electronic measurement in local markets, measurement of out-of-home viewing and measurement of viewing on personal video devices, plus another to begin looking at the integration of TV and Internet measurement.

“The next two steps are to expand the number of local peo-ple-meter markets and expand upon how we measure digital coming into the home in a mobile society,” said Nielsen spokesman Jack Loftus. o

NOVEMBER 6, 2006

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