On Reach

The other week I read somewhere about quota crisis in reachquot There is no crisis in reach If the media numbers bother you that much just go and buy a national OOH campaign What there is on the other hand is a crisis in understanding what exactly the word quotreachquot meansInvite job candidates to apply live during the Media and Advertising Communityamp8217s Black Talent Outreach Week at MediaVillagecom and AdvancingDiversityorg October 1720 Apply for jobssubmit your resume hereAt risk of turning this blog into the Ladybird Book of Media Planning letamp8217s go back to basics Reach is the percentage of the target estimated to have had an opportunity to see the campaign or ad at least once It a hard concept to grasp What is hard and what is therefore duly ignored is the notion that it really wise to compare apples to orangesAsk yourself or indeed your favorite sales rep the following questionsYou say I will reach 80 of my target with this video campaign Can you explain what you mean by 39reach39quotquotAh so 80 will see my ad For how longquotquotIf in my judgement two seconds is insufficient to get my message across what proportion saw say 10 secondsquotquotWhen you say 39see39 what exactly do you mean Is it they see the program or block in which the ad appears or the ad itselfquotquotDoes the number refer to the device or the person using the devicequotThe point is that the answers depend on where you are in the world our US friends still largely speak of program performance not ad break or ad performance and of course which particular channel is being usedThis goes back to the issue of definition What is a viewer and what criteria do you need to satisfy in order to qualify as oneAdvertisers really don39t care about reach impressions or ratings except as staging posts along the way to sales If quotxquot reach leads to quotyquot sales then great but what matters at the end of the day is the quotyquot salesFurther it may very well be that less reach however defined but made up of exposures in quality environments that are not just quotseenquot but noticed is what really mattersI know it can be tedious delving back in history to make a point but when the great Mike Yershon sold his client Fiat on only advertising in center breaks in ITVamp8217s main news and only ever first in break quotreachquot was not the only concept on his mindMike and others like him knew well rigorous research evidence or not that noticeability counted and while it is easy to say if noone has the opportunity to see the ad then by definition noone could notice it that assumes we cannot keep two concepts in our heads at the same timeIn a forthcoming asi podcast interview my Crater Lake colleague David Beaton from the advanced analytics business Navigation makes this point very wellDavid suggests that quality of exposure matters a lot when it comes to assessing eventual outcomesPaul Feldwick in his excellent book Why Does the Pedlar Sing does much the same when he refers to the power of fameYou get to be famous by being noticed not just by reaching some poorly defined media metric that is only there to help inform what is at the end of the day a refined guess an estimateMedia metrics like reach are a staging post along the way a means to an end not the end in itselfClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Brian Jacobs

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