In Terms Of ROI: Sex/Age Targeting Has Hurt Certain Networks - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBloggers

As Dave Poltrack often notes, any true advertising ROI value that a network brings to an advertiser is invisible. The only pinhole through which value is allowed to be recognized is on the basis of sex and age demographics of viewers.

On the face of it, this would seem to be a pretty tiny metric as compared to the Total Value Of Ownership (TVO) of a piece of TV inventory. TVO would be the metric combining all the effects on engagement, attention, eyes on screen, recall, persuasion, and sales effects short term and long term. That would be an ROI metric.

The sex/age of opportunities-to-see (OTS) viewers who may not even be looking at the screen, as a percentage of all that would be included in TVO, would seem on judgment to be maybe single digit small. Creative, media scheduling, targeting, branded integration, the effect on the trade of being in the big shows, etc. – all that is in the TVO.

Of course the network does not control the creative, so that part of TVO is in principle not compensatable to the network – that's for the creative agency.

So for decades we have been using a very tight sieve through which to put the metrical TVO thinking that drives how we spend $70B a year in the U.S.

What that does for certain networks is to ostracize them for having audiences that are either too old – or sometimes even too young. 25-54 says that those 16-24 year olds who feel that they are the hippest people in creation, are of no value to most of the companies in America.

As soon as you start to look at purchase data, you see that sometimes these audiences that are either too hot or too cold (Mmmm, that one is just right, says Baby Bear) are buying your product – lots of it. Their age didn't matter in their case – oh well, no system is perfect. Sex/age grinds on for half a century.

Tough economic times have a wondrous way of focusing one's mind. Hmm, TV ROI dipping below $1, I am losing money and can't make it up in volume; the brand tells me we can't lower TV or the bottom line effect would be even worse…. so maybe I should try to measure ROI so I know what parts of TV are working? And maybe I should be targeting true purchasers of some kind, not just sex/age? Out of financial squalor a new age dawns.

The networks that will benefit the most by the move to purchaser targeting as part of the currency bundle, are the ones who are at either age extreme. In the long run they will all benefit by showing more of their precious TVO, long hidden under a bushel.

Bill Harvey has spent over 35 years leading the way in the area of media research with special emphasis on the New Media. Bill can be contacted at bill@traglobal.com.

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