MPG's 2nd quarter Collaborative Alliance was held at the Helen Mills Theater on Thursday, June 3. Like past meetings of the Collaborative Alliance, the event was well-attended by 250 media
professionals. For those who arrived late, standing room only.
Five keynote presentations were given.
Turner Broadcasting's presentation was entitled "Beyond Recall: Measuring the
Impact of Contextual Advertising on Television." Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer, and Stacey Schulman, senior vice president, sales research explained the potential of "priming," which, for
Turner, is the strategic placement of advertising adjacent to relevant content. According to Turner, customized message placement = increased relevance, as well as, intention to purchase. The
presentation cited both OTX and Innerscope Research to support the power of priming, the added value of contextual linkage between the advertising and the content, and the impact of an emotional link
where the advertising and the content evoke a similar emotional response. The presentation demonstrated the impact of priming on improvements in brand attributes, brand recall, purchase intention and
emotional engagement,
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The second presentation, from Simulmedia, was entitled "How to Win Viewers and Influence Sampling Using Set-Top-Box Data (Or how I learned to stop worrying and love
'Saved by the Bell')." Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan described a research methodology designed to optimize the performance of on-air TV promotional campaigns. He explained Simulmedia's predictive
technology platform for analyzing set-top-box data. The methodology, which is used to pinpoint best sources of prospective viewers for a future telecast, estimates availability of audience,
likelihood to watch (i.e. not overly loyal to a competing program) and genre receptivity (served up as a genre based viewer segmentation). He went on to discuss the Simulmedia approach to locating
prospective viewers for future TV schedules, i.e. in markets, networks, programs, days, timeslots with significant concentrations of target audience. An October 2009 case history demonstrated the
power of the Simulmedia system with a 91% improvement in viewership conversion -- which is the ratio of those "exposed" to a tune-in promotion, and actual tune-in.
In a presentation entitled,
"Measuring Internet and TV Usage Simultaneously in the National People Meter Panel," Cheryl Idell and Matt O'Grady from Nielsen's Media Product Leadership team reported on Nielsen's efforts to
integrate online and TV media measurement. They briefly described the measurement technology and provided a preliminary report of simultaneous usage (TV + online) findings. They reported on the
characteristics of simultaneous usage: trends in incidence of simultaneous usage, demographic patterns, % of TV time spent multitasking, variation in simultaneous usage by TV program genre, and
similarities between what's on TV and what's on the PC.
Mew Media Metrics principals Gary Reisman and Denise Larson presented their proprietary single source process/approach for
quantitatively measuring Emotional Attachment (EA) to brands and media properties. According to Reisman and Larson, having both components helps to reach a marketer's most lucrative prospects in the
media they most intensely consume. The approach is based on work done by John Bowlby (1907-1990) in the areas of "attachment theory" and the "bonding process." Emotional attachment to both brands
and media properties is measured on a 11-point scale (0-10). The more "attached" someone is to a brand and/or media property, the more likely they are to be users of a brand and/or intent viewers of
the media. The metric is highly predictive. Those who rate a brand 9/10 on the scale are the most loyal prospects -- and buy the product with great frequency. Those who rate a media property 9/10
(e.g., any network such as ABC, any website such as MySpace.com, etc.) intently view that media property. The NMM system is well validated. A case history, based on work developed for Kraft, was
used to illustrate typical study results. The presenters discussed a recent syndicated emotional attachment study that covers a broad range of both product categories/brands and media types/vehicles.
The final presentation was from the Set-Top-Box Think Tank, a Collaborative Alliance initiative. Presenters Charlene Weisler and John Morse suggested a methodology for developing national
ratings estimates for unrated networks. The proposed methodology was straightforward. Select a set of Nielsen-measured networks similar in genre to the network requiring an audience estimate.
Compare audience estimates for that set of networks, based on the Nielsen and Rentrak methodology. Develop an estimate of Rentrak vs. Nielsen coverage, i.e. Rentrak as a % of Nielsen estimated
audience by network and in aggregate. Use the aggregate coverage estimate to project the unrated network's audience to the Nielsen universe. In the illustration, Bloomberg was the unrated network.
Rentrak networks were found to deliver approximately 4% of Nielsen's national estimate. The 4% estimate was used to develop a projection of Bloomberg audience within the Nielsen national universe.
Those present felt that this use of benchmarking helps to gauge the relative audience delivery for networks not currently measured by Nielsen.
This synopsis was written by Joseph Abruzzo,
MPG executive vice president/director, research