• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, September 12, 2012

For advertisers, TV is becoming a lot less about reach, demographics and cost per points and more about brand targets, relevancy and cost per value points.

At least that’s the case for clients of Horizon Media, said the agency’s founder and CEO, Bill Koenigsberg, speaking at the TVB Forward Conference in New York on Wednesday.

Koenigsberg provided a glimpse of some of the new metrics that Horizon is using to assess the TV medium and how and to what extent clients ought to use it.

“The world is changing,” Koenigsberg told the gathering of TV station managers at the conference. “If you can adapt, there are incredible opportunities.”

How the agency is leading clients is “very different than it was just three years ago,” he said. The overarching focus now is “how to create value for clients.” The agency now uses a number of new proprietary tools to determine if television should be in the mix for a client. Processes also use new criteria for selecting TV programs, channels and station audiences.

“We’re not telling clients” which choices to make, said Koenigsberg, noting that purchase behavior can be linked to viewing preferences, which now weigh much more heavily in TV planning and buying decisions.

Thus, highly rated shows and channels don’t automatically make the cut if other data indicates they are used by consumers as “wallpaper,” but not places where viewers are open to receiving messages about purchase decisions, Koenigsberg said.

Increasingly, advertisers are looking for and finding audiences that are patched together across multiple media with the common characteristic that they are open to receiving a message about specific products and brands.

Programs are now assigned “brand values,” said Koenigsberg, which will vary by category and brand. Throwing out hypothetical numbers to illustrate the point, he said that a spot in the "Today" show might be priced at a $1,000. But given the purchase behavior patterns and other characteristics of the audience, the spot might be worth $1,600 to Target but only $1,350 to K-Mart. “All impressions are not created equal,” said Koenigsberg.

"Social currency” is now part of the buying decision process, as well. Factors such as how much “chatter” programs generate and length of time spent viewing are considered.

Usage may have been the old core of TV buying, said Koenigsberg. But now advertisers want environments where viewers are most receptive to messages about their brands.  As a result, “relevance and the importance of channels to viewers” are front and center metrics in the TV buying world.