Agencies: Programmatic Still Pre-Post-Web
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, August 25, 2016
For all the talk about programmatic media-buying’s impact on traditional media, a panel of agency experts said the transition is happening relatively slowly due to the historical
“siloed” approach to media-buying and the lack of comparable metrics.
“Obviously, traditional [media] is bought on a different metric -- GRPs, TRPs -- when is the day that we’re going to have GRPs converted into impressions?,” Ashley Evenson, director, Ciceron Digital Media Group, said during the “Post-Web Programmatic: Radio, OOH, TV… Everything?” panel at the Programmatic Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe.
Fellow panelist Eric Perko, director of media services, Muhtayzik-Hoffer, concurred, noting that while adoption of programmatic should be “rooted in the audience you are trying to reach,” the industry still needs a “universal language” to enable that to happen.
He cited a previous agency experience in which his group figured out a way to convert digital buys into traditional metrics and freed up traditional budgets in the process.
“Converging everything in TRPs and GRPs really allowed budgets to flow to digital,” he said.
He criticized the industry’s siloed approach to planning and buying individual media, noting: “To a consumer, it’s all one thing. They’re not thinking in different buckets. To a consumer, it’s all one message.”
I don't really get why it's so hard to get "comparable metrics" for digital and TV. If you know how many "impressions" you are paying for in digital and you accept that these represent a reasonable opportunity to see your ad, all you do is divide by the number of people in the population or target group and you get rating points---GRPs---just like in TV. I suspect that what the clients of these media agencies are really concerned about is not figuring out CPMs or GRP tallies but whether a TV commercial as seen in a "linear TV" context has greater impact than a digital video ad as exposed on a PC, tablet or smartphone screen. Another reason why programmatic's progress---if it can be called that---in traditional media is so slow is the reluctance of media sellers to put most of their GRP inventory into play so cherry picking computers can select only those venues that suit their targeting specs and pay the least for ads in them.
Ed, you hit the nail on the head. Converting impressions to GRPs and vice versa is simple media math. It can't just be that. Maybe it's the difference between video impressions and and static display. Maybe online video impressions are more expensive (on a cost per impression basis) than tv. Maybe it's because the digital data used to identify targets isn't as precise as we think or wish. Maybe it's that the relatively small supply of digital (online) means you see the same ad over and over and over and over......