It sure is an exciting time to be in media planning these days with the explosion of new ways to reach consumers. Technology is driving this ever-evolving media landscape with digital and mobile fueling it. With all of the choices at a media planner’s disposal, it’s important to remember that a sound media strategy starts with your target audience: Who are they? What are the challenges in reaching them? The objectives for the campaign? It’s too easy to get caught up in this digital world. More “traditional media” still warrants strong consideration – sometimes, you just need to be creative and think about how to use it differently to help a brand achieve its goals.
Consider this example from one of our credit union clients. For them, we typically run multiple spots for different financial products on local cable television. Recently, we developed a buy in a more targeted manner utilizing the local cable operator’s Household Addressable TV property. Rather than a typical creative rotation and hoping we reach viewers who were in need of the product, we married household attributes from third-party data providers based on demographics, attitudes and behaviors similar to what we use in the digital world with set top box insights. In doing this, we were able to match every household with one of the client’s products. From there, we served each household the most relevant commercial from our repertoire on those networks we know are watched regularly by the desired target. Over the course of the campaign, our schedule has been continually optimized by network and day-part.
While this television campaign is just wrapping up (so we’re still waiting on final numbers), it’s proven to be an enlightening experience: It’s clear that buying local cable in this manner for a client with multiple messaging not only helps to increase marketing efficiencies, it can improve campaign effectiveness with a more effective CPM.