• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, September 7, 2005

In recent weeks I've been talking about the ways in which media are being used to enter into a conversation with customers rather than speak to them in a one-way broadcast format. If we follow this path of discussion then we must begin to think about the role that media will play in a new structure.

Currently most people plan media utilizing a reach and frequency model, but any good media planner will tell you there are inherent flaws in this model. Reach and frequency are old-world terms that have been carried over simply because there is not yet anything to supplant them. I think if we follow the model of conversation with the customer, then we can identify two specific roles for the various media vehicles to be considered: introductory media and dialogue media.

Introductory media are any vehicles used for the purposes of starting a conversation. They are so-called icebreakers. They are whatever formats you identify for raising initial awareness, piquing curiosity, and starting to engage the consumer.

Dialogue media are any media formats you utilize to continue a conversation and have an exchange with the consumer. These are the formats that have some element of response mechanism integrated into them.

Any media format can be used for either purpose, but some are weighted towards one role or the other. Television, for example, is the most widely used introductory media format because it is the best at generating emotion using sight, sound, and motion. The Internet, conversely, is widely accepted as the most effective format for dialogue because it is the best vehicle for having a true discussion with the consumer. Those roles being established, you can certainly utilize TV for a dialogue and the Internet for an introduction.

Reach transforms slightly into a metric that can help identify which portions of your target audience are going to be initially exposed to the introductory media. For example, you will want to subsegment out the target audience and develop a strategy for a rolling exposure to each of these groups. For example, if we look at a broad range of men 18 to 44, we might roll out the introductory media formats to 18 to 24, 25 to 34 and 35 to 44 separately using different media vehicles, different creative, and different messaging. Then, you would support these three distinct groups with separate dialogue efforts. For example, they would utilize direct mail, online and radio simultaneously but with slightly different placements and messages.

Frequency quickly becomes an outdated metric as we only focus on the role of media and how far down the path a consumer has come in the conversation. If they are very far down the path and have not become a customer yet, then we may choose to disengage from conversing with them and move on to the next subsegment. It might require a cross-media effective frequency of more than six times, but the generalization of these numbers can no longer be applied as we will focus on the messaging and the consumer's response to determine the effective frequency.

What this model requires is for the media planner to expand his or her role slightly and perform a deeper dive into the behavior of the consumer. The consumer's media usage patterns and how they interact with various forms of media through the day become extremely important.

If you are utilizing TV as an introductory medium, then you want to limit the brand interaction with the consumer until they've seen the TV spots. This means either you start the flighting for the Web efforts after the primetime TV spots have run (10 p.m. or later) or you find some means of decreasing exposure to the users who haven't seen them. Typically a Web campaign would launch at midnight on the day of a launch, but flighting based on day-parting could become important once again.

The final element of the model requires the media planner to work in close proximity to the creative team. What we see is the evolution of the prototypical media planner into the typical communications planner. Communications planning is the means by which companies identify and build the relationship between messaging and media. The behavioral elements are at the core of what a communications planning team would look at, and in this model the basic media teams need to do the same.

It's not a historical, revolutionary way of rethinking the model, but it definitely requires some change. It requires media teams to function outside of the typical silos of reach and frequency and composition and coverage. It requires more upfront research and analysis and it requires some technology to properly track or expose an audience to the messages you want them to see.

I am curious what you think of the model?