• by Erik Sass , October 6, 2005

The ad industry has come up with innumerable ways to describe, measure, and manage the media universe. Now it's applying the science of the physical universe. In a new twist on the laws of time and space, a team of former Russian scientists working for Havas media shop MPG USA has developed a new approach they're calling "media physics." The concept, unveiled for the first time in the United States during a day-long symposium in New York on Wednesday, marries the principles of social physics to the art and science of media planning.

Trotting out mathematical formulas that would likely make the average media planner's eyes gloss over, the MPG team--Dmitri Kuznetsov, a tall, soft-spoken man; and Igor Mandel, shorter, thickset, voluble--presented what they claimed to be a new wave in social science. It's one that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data, and a fair amount of expert human judgment to model mass consumer behavior with considerably less data and more accuracy than standard econometric methods that have become popular on Madison Avenue.

The advantage, they said, is its predictive capacity, which enables agencies to hypothesize the results of different strategies in a dynamic marketplace--including the probable responses of competitors.

At its core, media physics relies on a series of mathematical formulas so dauntingly complex that the audience of high-level media executives at Le Park Meridien hotel laughed when a sample was projected on screen. Later, after offering a far more accessible metaphor using fish in a pond, Kuznetsov projected the formulas again, emphasizing that it was "only so you know there is real math behind it, not just fish."

Described in general terms, however, the application of media physics relies on the same kind of linear regressions used in standard econometric models to forecast yields, but adjusts them to take new variables into account such as seasonality, cultural trends, peaks and spikes in sales, and those two physics classics--distribution of advertising over space and time.

But unlike conventional approaches to econometric modeling, which are used to identify marketing and media phenomena, Mandel said media physics seeks to "determine why things happen."

For example, both men emphasized the influence of a single variable: "opinion exchange" among consumers, or what is more commonly known as "word of mouth." To illustrate the flexibility of the model, Mandel noted that word of mouth plays a vastly different role in eastern and western cultures, with varying implications for the efficiency of ad spending.

While the concepts may seem like abstract science, Kuznetsov and Mandel cited immediate payoffs for MPG and its clients. For example, the system has helped identify the ad spending minimums and maximums, and where the "sweet spot" of ROI is most likely to occur in ad campaigns. In one recent example, they claimed the approach enabled a "major automotive" client to trim $9 million from its ad budget without an appreciable decline in sales.