• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 6, 2008

Not that reach and frequency are exactly en vogue in media planning these days, but the term “replication” is now being used by the online ad network community in a way that traditional media planners and buyers might have used to describe “duplicated reach,” or what old-schoolers might have called “frequency.” At least that’s the sense I got listening to the panelists speak on the “Buyers Place Their Bets: Are Networks Living Up to Their Hype?” during the morning session of the OMMA Ad Nets conference in New York.

In any case, it seems to be a bad thing, because it connotes waste and inefficiency, much the same reason why frequency has grown unpopular in the modern era of traditional media planning.

This is interesting, because there were all sorts of theories when I started reporting on the media planning business some 25 years ago, about “effective frequency,” or the number of times it takes to impact a consumer with an ad impression.

One reason why effective frequency has died as a concept is the rising cost of media. It’s simply not cost effective to run more than one impression to reach a target these days. Another reason was the push toward “recency” media planning popularized by industry media planning dean, Erwin Ephron more than a decade ago. For Ephron, recency was a solution to the rising cost of media, and the basic theory was that an impression one was good enough to influence a consumer so long as the impression was rendered when the consumer was in the market for that brand.