• by Tom Hespos , January 7, 2003

For the past few weeks, I’ve made it a point to discuss the current state of the market with regard to planning tools. I consider the adoption of planning tools to be a critical issue in our industry. Simply put, we need to take advantage of what suppliers are putting out there in order to streamline our day-to-day workflow and make sure that we’re not losing the media game due to process issues. We have to catch up to our traditional media brethren and ensure that putting together a $1 million online campaign is as quick and easy as putting together a scatter buy in TV or a spot buy in radio. And when we put these buys together, we have to give our clients a reasonable picture of what to expect from their campaign, in terms other than impressions and clicks.

One of the critical areas in our developing process is scenario development. Previously, putting together more than one media plan scenario for online was a giant pain. Getting a handle on costs and potential reach for each scenario involved a tremendous investment in manpower. Many times, agencies would present only one scenario option that would be revised countless times before an actual campaign launch, if the campaign was approved to run at all. It wasn’t easy to make it apparent to clients how the relationship between online vehicles, flighting, levels and other factors affected reach and frequency.

We’ve got a handle on this in traditional media. Given the right tools, any media planner can show their client why purchasing five cable networks might serve their goal more efficiently than buying three. But how do we do this in online media?

I was recently given a demo of some of the new offerings from Telmar. If you’ve planned traditional media, you know that Telmar has been in the space for a long time with tools that allow planners to perform just about every function when used in conjunction with syndicated research data. Telmar has done a remarkable job of providing similar tools to interactive planners.

The folks at Telmar took me through something called Web Planner recently. It is a wonderful tool that allows planners to evaluate web schedules, much like traditional planners might evaluate TV or radio schedules. The tool comes with its own site-centric database, and when coupled with syndicated research from providers like ComScore or Nielsen//NetRatings, it becomes even more powerful.

What’s really cool about Web Planner is that it allows one to start with a particular communication goal, like an effective reach or effective frequency goal. Planners can enter in sites, flighting, CPMs and other information and Web Planner can evaluate the schedule according to the goals specified. One interesting piece of data that is revealed is a given site’s “run rate” during the specified schedule. That is, the percentage of total impressions that the site must serve in order to get to the goal. Although no sites currently allow for buying in this fashion, the run rate figure can be extremely valuable, as it can point out where a particular plan scenario might be unrealistic in its expectations. For instance, if a given plan calls for Yahoo to serve your ad 30% of the time to reach a given goal, you might consider adding some sites or adjusting your levels such that you come to a more realistic run rate.

The real impact of this tool, in my opinion, is that it allows for quick and easy scenario planning. When those client requests come in, it’s not very long before an average planner can come up with three or four scenarios that will address the communication goal, which is what clients are looking for anyway.

Efficient predictive modeling is a big sticking point in our process, but tools like Telmar’s can help bring this about.

Another predictive tool that is worth looking at is Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms database. While other predictive tools have concentrated on the quantitative aspects of reach, frequency and GRPs, MarketNorms operates in the areas in which Dynamic Logic is strong – measuring the lifts in brand attributes like brand favorability, message association and purchase intent.

The MarketNorms tool allows advertisers to gauge what to expect from their online advertising campaigns, based on a number of factors, including creative technology, ad frequency, ad format, background colors and other attributes of the ad. One can also benchmark performance by gender, household income, product category and other variables.

If I wanted to run an automotive campaign, I might use the MarketNorms database to show me how floating ads might affect brand favorability as compared to Flash skyscrapers. I can see how these ads affect my various age and gender targets within my category, based on data from the thousands of ads that have run with Dynamic Logic studies attached to them. In this way, I can benchmark my success and get a much better idea of what to expect from my campaign. If I want to, I can also benchmark specifically against campaigns that I’ve run in the past, rather than compare against the industry-wide MarketNorms database.

I’ve mentioned before that not only do we need to adopt analogs of traditional planning tools to give us a gauge of reach, frequency and GRPs, but we also need to develop tools to leverage the unique insight that interactive media provide. This will help us leapfrog the competition as far as TV and radio are concerned. I don’t know of an offline analog for Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms tool, and that’s a good thing. We need to do more than get to parity with traditional media. We need to surpass it by providing things we can’t get in other media.

If you haven’t yet conducted a review of the tools on the market, I suggest you do so as soon as you can. These tools will bring us closer to tapping into traditional media budgets, which our industry needs to flourish.