CTM Relevance - A New Dimension in Media Planning

Unlike traditional media, the Internet fulfills multiple needs, including entertainment, communication and product/services research. Different consumers have very different motivations for using the Internet. How's a media planner to assess motivations and deploy Internet marketing that works? Contextual Temporal Mindset (CTM) Relevance is the answer.

That's according to a recent Starcom IP research project, which highlights the merits of aligning marketing communications with consumer motivations for using the Internet.

According to Starcom IP Director Christian Kugel and Insights Manager Michael Zeman, who presented the findings at the ESOMAR Worldwide Audience Measurement 2003 Conference, the result is a framework media planners and buyers can use to anticipate and leverage receptivity and counter situations where online consumer approachability is low. It also shows that contextual and mindset relevance are two different things.

Kugel says the project began when his team analyzed some Dynamic Logic research results and found that in several instances, campaigns with identical variables (exact same creative units, flighting, demographics,) performed better on some sites than others in accountability metrics. The researchers wanted to find out why that was the case and after brainstorming put forth a theory that ad performance is closely related to why online users visited a particular website in the first place. Kugel says that for the ads the performed well, it looked like visitors went to a particular site for a very specific reason and the ad units probably aligned with that reason.

Through focus groups, researchers determined that there are four distinct types of activities online users engage in: communication, entertainment, researching information about products and servers, and researching information about hobbies, interest and passions. Based on various criteria the researchers found that "there something there that relates to receptivity of advertising," Kugel says.

After segmenting online users into these "motivation buckets," Kugel says it quickly became apparent that "if advertising is aligned with the fundamental reason why consumers are online in the first place, it's more likely to be noticed and there will be a higher level of receptivity."

According to the findings, if media planners start with the question of "Why did a person go to site a to begin with?" and create messages relative to that motivation, rather than the content of the site, they "should be able to leverage a natural level of receptivity, and avoid executions that don't fit," Kugel explains.

Most of the findings, he admits, are intuitive, such as people who visit sites in the Entertainment category are much more interested in being amused than people who are online researching their next car. "We're not saying, drop what you're doing, come think about it like this," Kugel says, "You're probably already doing it, but put yourself in the seat of the consumer and think about why would a consumer go to any of these sites. Align motivation with the message with the specific environment."

The research was nominated for the John and Mary Goodyear Award for Best International Paper.

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