• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, September 15, 2021

Brand and demand: Throughout my entire career in media and marketing, I have viewed these as two sides of the same coin. You identify an audience, you target them, and then you deliver a message that you hope will resonate. 

The way you evaluate performance depends on the metrics you choose, but tactically you are using the same types of media. Some metrics are more focused on branding, and some are more focused on demand generation. The actions you take are derived from those metrics.

In a digital world, we overlook two important metrics for brand development that have downstream impact on demand generation: the opportunity to see and the opportunity to engage.

I wrote about these metrics many years ago, and to be honest, I forgot about them. These days, I find myself resurrecting the discussion around these two metrics as important ways to evaluate brand campaigns in a digital world.

Opportunity to see (OTS) is the number of exposures that a particular audience has to see a specific message in a campaign. It is a good barometer of your estimated coverage against a specific target audience and is a better metric than simply looking at reach.

You calculate OTS by looking at gross reach (the total audience) divided by the net reach (the number of people you reached once). This takes into account a measure of frequency and can help you understand whether your targeting was too narrow or too wide.

The number you come up with enables you to understand how you should adjust your media buying to allow for frequency. I personally like to look at OTS across all digital assets. 

OTS is a standard media metric. I also like OTE, or opportunity to engage -- a more creative metric and one that is not widely adopted by marketers. To me, OTE refers to whether your frequency is high enough to allow your audience to engage with your campaign over time.

If you have a low OTS or low frequency, you are not giving your audience the chance to engage, because you are relying on the message itself to drive an immediate interaction. 

Standard best practices for online and digital state that the optimal frequency to get audience to engage is around 6x.  A frequency of 2 or 3 means your creative has to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

To do that, your creative needs to be controversial, disruptive or loud enough to garner attention immediately. 

You may not be looking to drive a click, but your brand message wants to be noticed, and digital is a cluttered environment.  You need frequency.

OTS is a straight-up media metric. OTE is a media + creative metric and is admittedly more subjective. It requires you to evaluate whether your message is subtle or disruptive. It requires you to establish a point of view on whether you think the creative can drive engagement with a lower frequency or not. 

Whether you are running a brand, demand or brand response (combo) campaign, these are metrics you can use to help you evaluate what is going on. They create insights, and insights are used to drive actions.

And actions are what you are paid to do, after all.