• by Jim Meskauskas , July 2, 2002

“What's the time? - It’s time to get ill” – The Beastie Boys

Online media as both an industry and as a profession continues to show signs of maturity. Companies that cannot survive on their own any longer either merge with one another to survive, or they simply go away. Best business practices are developed and standardized so that publishers who sell media and advertisers or their agencies who buy it can all rely on the same expectations of how transactions and their reconciliation will take place, which leads to more transparent and efficient dealings. Methodologies and rules of engagement have evolved that lend the practice of online media the kind of intellectual rigor found in other professions, turning it away from a series of free-form interactions and executions and towards an actual formal discipline. And finally, concepts and models from online media's forebears, namely, traditional media, are finding their way into the de rigueur activities and applications of the online media practitioner.

One such concept from the world of traditional media is finally making its way onto the web. It is an idea from broadcast media, called the daypart.

Most of you out there have probably heard of it, yes?

It has been the toast and talk of the town for the last couple of months, though first coming to light in the online media world when CBS Marketwatch last year sold daypart inventory to Budweiser.

In traditional advertising, the daypart is a subsection of the day during which a TV or radio program, or a series of related programs, airs. In television, the daypart breaks are called Early Morning, Daytime, Early Fringe, Early News, Access, Prime Time, Late News, and Late Fringe. In radio, there are only half as many dayparts: AM drive, Day, PM Drive, and Evening/Weekends.

Basically, all these are nomenclature for various times of day in which certain kinds of programming can be found that attract certain kinds of audiences. Dayparts are one of the ways to identify program scheduling. Early Morning is when you will find 'The Today Show' or 'Good Morning America' on. Daytime is that time of day from 9am to about mid-afternoon when all the soaps are on. Late Fringe is that time, a couple hours after the late-night news is over, when Letterman and Leno are on the air. Most people are familiar with what can be found on during Prime Time because that's when the most number of people are usually home watching television; hence the moniker "prime;” it is when TV’s brightest stars come out to shine.

When planning media, the most important thing to identify is the target audience. In doing research for finding that target audience, it is possible to find times of day that have particularly high compositions of a target audience over other times of day. But in broadcast, programming drives a great deal of that. I want to reach stay-at-home mothers? In the old days, the Daytime daypart was a good way to do that. Why? Because it is in the middle of the day when soap operas are on. The programming goes to the time of day where the audience most likely to want to watch it is available. When the stay-at-home mother wasn't chasing after the kids or running errands, there was a good likelihood she was watching the soaps. And please remember, this is an example of the “old days.” In today’s world, stay-at-home dads can watch soaps, too…

But in online media, programming isn't dependent on time-of-day. It is a 24/7 medium that is omnipresent. Any time of day, any day, one can go to their news site of choice and find out what's going on in the world. At 2 a.m. an individual can check out the scores of the Anaheim Angels on a sports site. The content being engaged does not have any temporal limitations, neither in its availability nor in the desire one might have in going to it.

However, another thing that dayparts do is to identify actual times of day. Some advertisers may only be interested in a particular time of day because there is a certain program that attracts a high concentration of desired audience. But some time certain times of day have an affinity with the product or service being advertised. What if I want to sell coffee? Most people think of mornings when they think of coffee. Maybe it makes sense to talk to people in the morning about the coffee I have to sell.

Coffee commercials are run in the morning. Why? Well, that time of day is certainly a lot more conducive to coffee drinking than right as you are sitting down to dinner.

When I was working on Nestle Beverage Company, when we bought radio, we didn't just buy run of station and let our spots flop on the air whenever the station got around to running them. We figured out what times of day and what days of week the target would most likely be most receptive to our messaging. PM Drive, Wednesday through Saturday. Why? Well, seemed like the best time to talk to folks about what kinds of things to pick up at the store. They're in the car; it's near the weekend. It just made sense.

Just as some products and services have seasonality (e.g. snow shovels in the winter, swim suits in the summer), so, too, do some products and services have temporal relevance. Advertising McDonalds’ Egg McMuffin in the morning news makes more sense than it does to advertising it in Early Fringe during Oprah. First of all, it is a breakfast item. Secondly, it is only available 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

The daypart is going to become a standard taxonomy for online media inventory in the coming months. It doesn’t make sense for every advertiser or for every objective, but there is no doubt that more nuanced targeting online is going to have to come to include more than just following a click-stream.