• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, July 14, 2004

Last week I got a rise out of the readers, which is exactly what I was looking for. The topic of Building a Brand is one that always gets people to come out and offer up an opinion, so let's have at it again.

If we go under the assumption that the consumer experience and word-of-mouth is what truly builds a brand in today's marketplace, then how do we incorporate Convergence and Clutter into the consideration set when we are developing a marketing campaign?

In order to encourage trial and convince a consumer to give your brand a shot, you must first acquire their attention long enough to convey a message and pique their curiosity. In today's environment this is much harder to do since the world is more cluttered and the inter-dependence on multiple forms of media makes it even more important to convey this message across multiple platforms to tell a convincing story. Does convergence make it even harder to create a successful advertising campaign?

It would seem that loading your dollars into one form of media is no longer an effective means of growing a business (see what happened to those companies who spent their entire ad budgets on a 1x SuperBowl spot or only on Television). You need to speak across a mix of media that is in-line with the behavioral tendencies of your audience and provides them with pieces of the overall message at the appropriate junctures. However, with media convergence increasing and Television morphing into Interactive Television and the Internet morphing into a more usable, more mobile technology, how do you effectively plan to deliver a message when the media vehicles start to overlap more than they ever did before? How do you ensure they see this message when regardless of the clutter in the marketplace, there are fewer and fewer outlets for your message?

This last question is one that I think should be the focus of the discussion. The world is more cluttered now than it ever was before and there are more marketing messages being thrown at the attention of the customer throughout the day. That being said, the concept of convergence seems to suggest that we are blurring the lines between the types of media that can be purchased and it will be more difficult to break out budgets onto separate line items within a media recommendation. The way that a media recommendation may need to be proposed to a client may be based on a daypart rather than a vehicle breakdown.

This concept means that you will now try to identify media vehicles by the time of day and the opportunity to see (OTS) rather than the traditional way of allocating to a medium based on a typical GRP analysis. This model is based on a Behavioral One-To-One planning model rather than a Reach/Frequency model.

For example, if you are trying to reach Target A to convey a message for your product, you will attempt to identify the path of their typical day first. You will attempt to understand what their typical schedule would be on an average day (workday or weekend), and once you have been able to do so you will then move to identify the types of media that are present during each of those respective daily periods. This analysis provides the ability to do a forced ranking of the OTS during each of these daily periods and create a model for media buying that tracks to the daily schedule of the target audience. You would then layer on a more typical reach/frequency analysis to determine how far your budget would extend into each of the segments of the audience of which you are tracking. This is not an entirely different model than most advertisers currently follow, but it does provide a more detailed behavioral analysis of the audience and demonstrates a deeper understanding of their media usage while incorporating in the elements of Clutter and Convergence. Both of these elements would be incorporated into the forced ranking of media OTS during each period of the day, and therefore in the allocation of media that is appropriated.

Do you think this model is of interest? Do you think it can be applied in the world today? At what stage of the planning process does this analysis get incorporated? I am interested in your thoughts.