• by September 28, 2004

HEAVY MEDDLE: WEIGHING IN ON WEB REACH - Anyone notice the surprising revelation in the research released earlier this week by DoubleClick and comScore Media Metrix? The team at Carat Insight did. The research, which purports to be the first ever audience accumulation study showing how websites build user reach over time, was touted as a breakthrough that would enable interactive agencies to apply reach-based planning approaches to their Internet buys, and which would allow full-service media shops to at least think about, if not actually plan the reach capacity of online media vs. television, and potentially other media. The study, and its companion white paper, is chockfull of fascinating insights about how audiences build on the Internet, and how they do not. It offers some epiphanies for media planners, as well as a bit of déjà vu.

The latter comes from one of the study's key findings: that the best way to reach light users of the medium isn't via its biggest players - the Big 3 portals: AOL, MSN and Yahoo! - but via smaller sites like CNN.com that deliver users who are unlikely to ever click into a portal. That finding may seem like déjà vu to traditional media planners, who've been hearing the same pitch for years about the ability of smaller niche cable TV players to deliver viewers that are underserved by the Big 3 broadcast networks. That's not such a radical notion, planning guru Erwin Ephron reminds us, because reach is built better via dispersed media plans that reach lots of different media users in lots of different places. And what's true for TV, apparently is true for the Internet.

Putting aside the question of whether interactive media planners should or should not be using reach as the basis for their online media plans, Carat's Rob Frydlewicz was struck by another of the study's epiphanies: "Their definition of heavy users, people who go online 19 times or more in a month."

In the TV universe, where Frydlewicz estimates heavy users surf channels for five or six hours a day, or about 35 hours a month, the Internet's "heaviest" surfers would seem like lightweights by comparison.

In fact, Frydlewicz says the DoubleClick and comScore definition of "heavy" is much lighter than existing industry definitions - such as Mediamark Research Inc.'s definition of going online "every day or more" - which Frydlewicz says many agency execs think is "not that heavy at all."

But most telling of all, intimates Frydlewicz, is the fact that the report didn't actually disclose any estimates for consumer reach. "It's interesting, because we don't know the actual reach numbers," he said, adding, "I have a feeling the reach numbers are so small right now - maybe only 3 percent - that it's mainly a frequency medium."