Cross-Platform Optimization: Getting to a Smarter Mix

Cross-Platform Optimization: Getting to a Smarter MixPublished: November 2010 | By Yahoo!

In today’s media landscape, content is consumed across multiple media, often simultaneously. To most effectively reach your target audience, media buying and planning must evolve to keep up with these changing consumer dynamics. Recognizing the challenge that planners and brands face when optimizing media allocations across multiple platforms, Yahoo! and Nielsen partnered on a new methodology to identify a “Smarter Mix” of media spending across platforms.

This study is the first of its kind to include TV, online, and print and is designed to help marketers:

1. Develop an approach to measure and optimize the effectiveness of cross-platform campaigns.
2. Improve reach, frequency and GRPs by changing media allocation between online, TV and print, while keeping the total cost the same.
3. Understand whether it’s better to re-allocate dollars across one platform or multiple platforms.
      

Measuring cross-platform campaigns

Using Nielsen’s expertise in cross-media measurement, which includes analytical tools that bring together panel data from multiple platforms to form a single-source media planning tool, four cross-platform campaigns were tested featuring national brands from the Automotive, CPG, Financial Services, and Retail sectors. Using Nielsen data, reach, frequency, synergistic reach, and GRPs were determined for each of the original campaigns. Now, the real challenge was determining which platforms to reallocate money to and which platforms to pull budget from. Based on the original campaign metrics, researchers were able to determine for each medium where marketers were seeing the point of diminishing returns. In other words, researchers looked for the point where incremental spend no longer resulted in significant lift in reach. The point of diminishing return was used to determine what percentage of budgets needed to be reallocated.

If an advertiser was overinvested in one media, dollars were moved from that platform and allocated to those in which the campaign was underinvested. Under investment was determined by comparing the potential reach of the advertiser’s target to the actual reach based on the current spend. By measuring the subsequent lift in reach and frequency, we were able to quantify the benefit of each reallocation and the optimal media mix, otherwise known as the “Smarter Mix.”

Cross-Platform Optimization: Getting to a Smarter Mix
























    Chart 1. Potential Reach on Each Platform vs. Actual Reach

Cross-Platform Optimization: Getting to a Smarter Mix
    Chart 2. Retail Media Mix Comparisons of Spend vs. Reach

   
Finding the Smarter Mix
For the four campaigns tested, three key findings emerged:

1. Significant under-investment in online. Although, the original media allocations in all cases showed an under-utilization of one or more platforms, the underinvestment for online was particularly dramatic (see chart 1).
2. Diminishing returns in traditional media. In all cases, the campaigns over-spent on traditional media to a degree where the spend in that media became inefficient. For the Retail campaign, 20% of the TV spend was beyond the point where additional dollars provided much incremental reach. By shifting that 20% to online and print, online reach increased by 21% and print by 7% (see chart 2).
3. Distribute media across more than one platform. For all four campaigns, the best wayto achieve maximum reach was to distribute the media budget across more than one platform rather than directing it all towards a single media. When the optimal amount was re-allocated from the most over-spent platform, a mix of the other two platforms always drove a significant improvement in reach.

Summary
In summary, this study explored a new way of thinking about cross-platform media planning using data available to any major advertiser. Brands can implement a similar methodology, leveraging the powerful tools available today, putting their own media planning to the test, and asking and answering key questions such as:

• Are we maximizing our reach across platforms?
• Do we have a good way to measure whether the incremental dollar spend per platform is placed where it will maximize brand recall?
• Are we reaching customers on all the media they prefer?

Download the Cross-Platform Campaigns: Getting to a Smarter Mix whitepaper and snapshot.

For more, listen to the Optimizing With a Smarter Mix and Better Creative webinar recording and click through the presentation deck (with speaker notes).

Download this article in PDF format.