CROSS-MEDIA BUYS: What Are They Worth?
- by June 18, 2002
“This is very much a new frontier,” says Judy Carlough, VP of affiliate and agency relations for broadcastspots.com, and a long-time buyer herself. The increased media involved in cross buys has in some cases exhausted agency resources. “The staff is very taxed, and they have a lot of money to move in a short period of time. Increasingly, agencies are asking vendors to provide them with more structured packages—in short, they’re asking for more help.”
Jon Mandel, Co-Managing Director of Mediacom, says his agency has a “converged buying operation,” but believes it is one of the few in this category. Right now, he admitted, TV people at the networks are juggling most of the cross-buy responsibilities, especially if the greater percentage of the deal is still TV-driven. “If you’re making a buy that is 90% TV and 2-4% of other media, a TV person will handle it.” Dave Smith, President of Mediasmith, a media buying, planning and strategy agency in San Francisco that often helps negotiate cross media buys for networks like NBC and CBS, concurs. “At most agencies, it’s the TV people doing the integrated buys, because they just don’t have integrated departments, and sometimes they have to go to their affiliates to get help.” The trend of the near future, he believes, is going to be a proliferation of “media planners and directors who understand all types of media, are trained to be the point person on a given account, and who are doing buys and evaluating buys.”
On the network side, the converging of responsibilities is happening more frequently. ABC, the Go Network, and their parent company, Disney, will have their staffs adapt similarly. By this fall, the Go Network marketing department will become part of ABC’s sales group, and the consolidation of ad sales staffs will continue. Eventually, ABC hopes, the integrated buys can be managed so effectively that an advertiser will never want for an opportunity to showcase their brand with the network.
NBC’s NBCi, run out of the Bay area, says its integrated buys are mostly Internet driven, shopping deals via SNAP, which the NBCi sales and marketing staff handles. This is their chosen alternative to focusing on integrating their primetime shows into integrated deals, as ABC and CBS have done with their shows like Who Wants to Be A Millionaire or The Drew Carey Show, and Survivor, respectively.
CBS, for its part, has had a consolidated buy division created by Mel Karmazin for integrated advertising, called CBS Plus, for several years.
Working Together The combination buys that have come out of staff consolidation and restructuring at the three major broadcast networks have evolved since late last year, and it’s clear that NBC, ABC and CBS have embraced the idea of packaging interactive media with their traditional buys better than some of the others.
NBC, in concert with NBCi, says Dave Smith, is focusing on cross media, equity-driven buys. One such deal he worked on was the relationship between bigwords.com, an online college textbook retailer, and NBC. After he helped NBC value the deal, Smith says, the “Back To School” promotion that evolved included NBC getting an equity stake in bigwords.com. This, in exchange for running numerous spots during The Late Show, other high visibility programs, and online ad at nbc.com.
It’s important to remember that it was likely television strategy that begot all of these Internet-related, integrated deals. Mike Shaw, Executive VP, National Sales Manager, ABC TV Networks, talked about how ABC’s first strides in the cross media buying space were done around the children’s TV market. “We started with kids’ programming—then added disney.com and family.com—and in addition we bundled, for the first time, Radio Disney, Disney Adventures, and Toon Disney. This exploited the multifaceted partnerships that Buena Vista TV, UPN’s M-F broadcast line up, and Disney share.”
Currently, ABC’s integrated buys can have an Internet component, where dollars must be committed up front, or they can be promotionally driven, where Shaw says, “all the elements are ID’d, but not the time frame.” Of course, ABC’s most recognizable cross media presence has been its skillful handling of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the show’s very visible AT&T sponsorship, both online and on air. The Media Edge’s Bob Igiel, President, Broadcast Division, has been responsible for the AT&T relationship since the show’s inception. Igiel says the AT&T deal with ABC not only helped Media Edge win a Golden Lion at Cannes this past July in the “Best Use of Sponsorship” category, it also was a huge business-building move for AT&T. “In the traditional ad sense, the use of the clocks and the ‘phone a friend’ on the show when the call has to go through was really a proper environment for this sponsorship.”
As well, AT&T provided an infrastructure for ABC to make the calling system possible which they would have been hard-pressed to engineer themselves. Igiel believes that this type of reciprocally structured deal is what integrated media buys are all about; using all the possibilities in the TV, web, radio and print spaces gives the client a better chance of reaching their consumer. “Multimedia platforming is more important now than ever: it’s about media conglomerates using their many assets to make their product more visible.” The future, says Igiel, clearly “points to integrated media executions across different platforms over the next 2-5 years.” And where in all this is CBS? Perhaps the former monolith that recently became part of the Viacom Empire will be the Cinderella story of integrated media buys. Lisa McCarthy, Senior VP of CBS Plus—CBS’ integrated sales and marketing division—says her group works across Viacom and CBS to create integrated sales and marketing programs. Though CBS has generally been less forthcoming about its cross media strategy in recent years, you might be surprised to learn that CBS’s first integrated campaign was in December of 1998 for Taylor Made Golf, nearly a year before ABC and NBC bought their web properties.
CBS Plus has since orchestrated even more complex deals, many of them utilizing their broadcast talent. Fidelity’s exclusive sponsorship of Dan Rather’s “American Dream” series, which spoke to the WW2 generation, proved successful for the network. For the duration of the Wednesday night series, when Rather was on the air, Fidelity was the exclusive sponsor of the ad that would run on local news, network and local radio. “Then we’d have bulletin boards set up on cbsnews.com to have viewers tell about their experiences during that time of their lives. We drove traffic and created an interactive experience. It wasn’t about impressions,” says McCarthy. “It was about developing an interactive component for our advertiser’s campaigns.”
Dave Smith considers CBS Plus a leader in integrated buys, and speaks highly of another CBS property—CBS Marketwatch—as a prime example of how buying—in this case, into the advertiser’s company—has evolved. The Marketwatch deal, he says, was originally a network-only buy that evolved into CBS’s equity stake in Marketwatch. “Someone was smart over there,” says Smith, and thought to “combine the broader buy with the editorial mentions, like the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather: then the payoff was higher.“ Smith, whose agency helped seal the deal, credits “the fact that we could reach the same consumer with TV, radio, the web and out-of-home—especially via CBS’ numerous outdoor properties and short form and long-form radio on the CBS Network” with helping them achieve value.
And it’s working elsewhere for CBS: Survivor, which has thus far been CBS’ greatest web—and perhaps on air—success ever, is not only saving itself, it may be saving the face of CBS Internet. CBS.com, which had lost quite a bit of audience share this year, seems to have rebounded on the popularity and resulting traffic of Survivor.
CBS has also consistently been the last one to jump on the web portal train, unlike its network brethren. Yet there may be something to this. The same strategy that saw the network buying up partial shares of sites like Sportsline, Third Age and Marketwatch several years ago has helped CBS make better use of their advertising time, rather than spending cash up front—as NBC and ABC did in their purchases of SNAP, Xoom and Go. CBS’ barter arrangements, not unlike NBC’s equity deals, allowed them to really push integrated advertising packages, since they often swapped the stakes in the aforementioned companies in return for advertising time during on-air programming. The interweaving of CBS News’ programming with their subsidiary sites like Marketwatch, thus, has a payoff each time a news anchor references the dot-com partner.
“We’ve learned the importance of getting the client and agency involved from the get-go, so that everyone’s accountable. The payoff is bigger than buying plain spots and dots, but it is a lot of work,” says McCarthy. And she’s on message, too: when asked whether buyers get more for their money with a CBS Plus integrated buy, McCarthy says her clients don’t seek more for less. “Typically, our clients don’t expect ‘better’ pricing because what we’re offering is premium: mostly we’re negotiating for what we can do that is innovative and fresh. We’re very direct with them about what they’re getting—it’s not about discounting. That’s not why Mel Karmazin created CBS Plus.”
But on the front lines of this rapidly changing buy landscape, what do the buyers themselves have to say about the viability of integrated buys, especially in their dealings with the networks?
More for Less, or Just a Better Buy? Jon Mandel of Mediacom, a seasoned network buy guru, stressed the importance of having a common thread between all media when doing an integrated buy, otherwise ”On a cross basis, you’re never going to have a solution. You look at what you’re making… what pieces you need to put together…and then say, what will work to fix my problem? What uniform concept can I put together between all of the different media? Otherwise, you’re just buying spots and dots.” Mandel does, however, offer some positives about cross media buys. “The greatest value [is that] clients can see greater sales.”
“The thing that everyone in the buying industry is painfully aware of,” says Judy Carlough, “is that more than ever you’re hitting a moving target. You have to move with the consumer, bond with them—hit them during the day.” There’s hope, though, she says. “Integrating traditional buys with other media to touch the consumer who has a high affinity for your product or service on network TV and radio” will get your brand across. Television today, Carlough believes, needs to develop “synergy and partnerships that deliver different media at different times” in order to grab hard-to-reach viewers.
Carlough highlights the need to stay current and pay attention to your client’s multiple media branding options. She cites McDonald’s as one of the best large-brand examples of effective cross media buying. “They’ll run a TV spot at 9 p.m. at night, and then a radio spot during drive time the next day, and shortly after you’ll get a coupon in the mail for the same product.” McDonald’s also has a sizeable web presence that they use in concert with their other media buys. But, Carlough issues a caveat: “McDonald’s is an impulse item. If you’re trusting a commercial that ran last night alone to sell your product, you’re really in another age where it was easier to cut through the clutter. You can’t do that with a single brilliant buy anymore.”
Mike Shaw of ABC notes that buyer’s and advertiser’s expectations are sometimes too high, and some advertisers think they will be getting more for less with an integrated buy. He encourages them to think bigger. “We’re focusing on the opportunity here for advertisers to put forth an integrated and consistent message because you’ve found the consumer on different platforms with the same message.”
Marlene Kruelle, Sr. Media Buyer for BBDO South in Atlanta, is sanguine about the increasing stature of Internet-oriented cross buys in general. “I can see radio and TV buying departments at large agencies placing online buys in the next six months or so. We can now present better plans to clients using Nielsen Net ratings and Media Metrix than we could before.”
But if the results of cross media buying are mostly unproven, and difficult to measure accurately, Bob Igiel sees no reason to worry. “Our tools are getting better as broadband becomes more of a reality, and we have more census tracking abilities.” Igiel suggests focusing on the actual purchasers of your client’s product, not the buy itself. The most important thing to keep in mind is “how the consumer uses the information that you’re providing them; this helps lead you into how you should best formulate your message.”
Freelance writer Alli Joseph can be reached at Shakagirl@aol.com.
