• by January 18, 2005

SIMM CITY AND THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL -- If 2004 was, as P&G marketing czar Jim Stengel suggested, the "year of media accountability," then 2005 is shaping up to be the year of "go ahead, prove it." It's one thing to say you want to make media more accountable. It's quite another thing to come up with a way of actually showing it was. We have no doubt that P&G has embarked on all sorts of new means for getting at that proof, it's backing of Arbitron's and VNU's Project Apollo system, being chief among them. We also have no doubt that Stengel's rallying cry at last year's media conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies has encouraged countless others to do the same. And while they haven't explicitly said they were inspired by P&G, the larger-than-life measurement team at BIGresearch has come up with a method it believes connects consumer media usage to the products they buy.

The system, an outgrowth of BIGresearch's Simultaneous Media Survey, purports to show the impact various media have on consumers' decisions to shop for and purchase products. If the application lives up to that claim, it could prove to be a short cut to the so-called Holy Grail of single source media and product consumption measurement. And unlike single source systems that measure those correlations, after the fact, BIGresearch's so-called SIMM research, can be used as a forward planning tool, by revealing which media have the greatest propensity to influence a purchase decision before the media buy is even made.

"Marketers have acknowledged that the consumer is boss and needs to be the center of marketing plans," says Joe Pilotta, vice president of research at BIGresearch, echoing some of the rhetoric advanced by P&G. However, Pilotta claims most marketers have so far "relied upon abstract ROI and optimization models as surrogates for real consumers' media behavior." While few would argue with that point, some might pick a bone with Pilotta's assertion that SIMM, a measurement system based on interviews with consumers, is empirical proof of such ROI.

"SIMM relies on real consumers to determine the value of each media for their purchasing decisions," he notes, adding, "If consumers are not receptive to a media, blanket exposures cannot make it influential." While we agree with that last point, we're not convinced that SIMM is the method for doing that, even if BIGresearch collaborated with renowned academics Don Schultz and Martin Block or Northwestern University's Medill School. Among other things, the system shows that "word of mouth" is more influential than advertising media for product categories such as electronics and home improvement products, while broadcast TV dominated a category like apparel products (see table below). And it would probably come as no surprise to any media planner that coupons and newspaper inserts are the most influential media in the grocery products category. At least that's what consumers said. To find out what they actually did, we may just have to wait for Apollo.

Media That Influencing Consumer Purchases

Electronics   Apparel   Grocery   Home Improvement 
Word Of Mouth         35.0%     26.1%     30.8%              26.4% 
FSI                   26.4%     27.6%     40.2%              21.7%

Broadcast TV          23.6%     19.7%     22.9%              19.0% 
Internet              19.0%     11.4%      8.9%               7.9% 
Email                 16.7%     12.7%      8.7%
6.8% 
Coupon                14.1%     16.7%     52.2%              11.2% 

Source: BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey. Derived from interviews with more than 14,000 consumers, measuring their consumption of 28 different media, which was aligned with their retail store shopping behavior, product consumption and media influence.