Advertisers who use standard planning for offline and interactive marketing could fatten their reach if they shift their ad dollars from television to the Internet, online marketing toolmakers DoubleClick Inc. said last week.
Releasing its Cross Media Reach and Frequency Study at the March 4 Insight 2003 conference, DoubleClick said such high-visibility advertisers as American Airlines, Subaru Motors, and Kraft Foods boosted their marketing reach when they shifted ad monies from TV to the Net.
All three companies were impressed with the online ad potential. "Online advertising offers opportunities for highly targeted audience composition, a factor that can no longer be excluded for successful media planning and buying," Subaru's vice president for marketing, Richard L. Crosson, said at the conference.
"The study confirms that consumers can no longer be efficiently reached through television alone, highlighting online's important role in the media mix," said DoubleClick's vice president and general manager for online advertising, Doug Knopper. "In the past there has been a disconnect between the way online and traditional media planning and buying has been conducted; today the WebRF tool will allow marketers to bridge this gap."
That tool was the creation of Neilsen//Net Ratings and ad software specialists IMS. Using the tool in a strategy to divide ad campaign spending and audience targets between offline and online groupings, DoubleClick said, it helped the three companies to understand that the Internet group "tends to watch less television, be younger, more affluent, more educated, and more likely to be a professional, therefore more desirable to marketers." And, a must-reach.
The Cross Media Reach study found American Airlines boosted their reach by over three million actual and potential customers, among business and leisure travelers in the 25-54 age range with incomes of $60,000 a year and above, when their prime ad agency, Temerlin McClain, pumped up American's Web advertising from five percent of media spending to 15 percent.
The results were more than pleasing to the airline. "With the increase in reach of over three million users and the fact that light TV users' frequency exposure increased, the results of this cross-media study clearly show a way to more effectively reach portions of our target audience through an appropriate online allocation. This will give the media buy better 'load balance'," said American's managing director for advertising, Rob Britton, at the conference.
The study found Subaru could boost their reach significantly just by growing their online ad spending from bare minimal if anything to about seven percent of their total ad spending. They targeted the same audience American targeted for the study and experiment. The results? Their reach among those who don't watch much if any television jumped from 75.4 to 78.4 percent...while the frequency of Subaru exposure among heavy television watchers actually dropped.
That got Subaru's attention. "[They] showed that by increasing our spend level through a small allocation of online in very targeted placements, we had the opportunity to better balance the frequency among our audience," Crosson said.
Under the same online ad experiment as the other two companies, Kraft made a larger boost in online ad spending for its popular Oscar Mayer Lunchables, and they targeted a slightly more specialized audience: women in the same age range as above but with children who were most likely to enjoy the pre-packaged box lunches, which usually include various lunch meats or pizza and taco fixings, snack crackers, and juices or sodas.
Kraft pumped up their online ad spending from nothing to 15 percent of their total ad spending for the study. And they got what they paid for: the Lunchables' audience reach went from 83 to 87 percent, keeping in mind that their target audience is usually among the heaviest of Internet users. And, among those in their target who didn't watch much television, Lunchables boosted their ad market reach seven percent.
Like American and Subaru, the results took with Kraft. "Since the rate of TV viewing has declined for online users over the last few years, it is essential to our business that we are able to effectively reach the right audience so that our media planning and buying initiatives are as successful as possible," said Kraft North America's director for e-communications, advertising, and strategy, Carole Walker, to the conference. "...[I]ncorporating media usage data into the mix will continue to be part of our business plan as we look to increase our return-on-investment."
