Commentary

ARF Audience X Science Day One: 'Frequency Is Crabgrass'

The winner of this year's Erwin Ephron Demystification Awards was Artie Bulgrin, who ran the innovative “Project Blueprint” for ESPN, and brilliantly managed to get Arbitron and Comscore to collaborate on it.

He recalled “our” mentor’s fundamental ad campaign reminder, “Frequency is crabgrass” along with, “Reach trumps frequency” at Day …

4 comments about "ARF Audience X Science Day One: 'Frequency Is Crabgrass'".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, April 27, 2023 at 8:36 a.m.

    Tony, Erwin  was renting space from me at the time he developed his recency theory using professor Jone's Nielsen scanner panel data for a number of packaged goods brands as his basis. So I talked with him in some detail about what the data actually represented. What Jones reported was that a home "reached" 2+ times per week by a brand's commercial did not buy twice as much of the advertised product as a home "exposed" only once  with "exposure" defined by set usage, not viewing. Yet the media costs for 2+ "frequency" were also 2+, making the extra "frequency" seem inefficient relative to results gained.

    This was the genesis of the notion that "frequency is crabgrass".  However, as I pointed out to Erwin, in reality,  many homes  classified as "being reached" once, were not reached at all. About 50-60% of the time the targeted consumer wasn't even the person watching the program carrying the commercial. But even  if the buying decision maker was watching the show, chances were that only half of these people also watched the commercial. In other words the ideal frequency per week ---relative to media costs ---was a zero frequency for most of these households. And taking it a step beyond, many of those 2+ frequency homes which were "reached" with "redundant" frequency---aka "crabgrass"---were in reality reached only once.

     My point is not to make light of what Erwin was saying---we were long time associates, partners in a business venture and friends. Rather, I'm giving an example of how misleading "impressions" can be when all that is measured is that the ad mesage appeared on a screen. Back then---in the mid 1990s----the media world was blindly accepting "audience" data as representing opportunity to view and all too often this slipped into the assumption that the ad message was actually viewed. Sadly, unless attentiveness is incorporated in our  evolving TV "audience" surveys we will be making the same mistake again.

  2. Tony Jarvis from Olympic Media Consultancy, April 27, 2023 at noon

    I think you are going to love my Op Ed and conclusions on Day 2 although there was a bit of a bombshell dropped by a major social media player!  The battle lines are clearly drawn on currency bases.  Now if only the industry would listen to you.  

  3. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, April 27, 2023 at 12:45 p.m.

    Looking forward to it, Tony.

  4. John Grono from GAP Research, April 28, 2023 at 1:11 a.m.

    Yes please Tony!

    And Ed, your frequency comments and explanation are very elucidating and they run parallel to all my learnings over the past ... well ... a long time.

    But I notice that the phrase from JPJ "What Jones reported was that a home "reached" 2+ times per week..." was relating to household reach.   The conclusion is that therefore frequency's impact is less valauble than reach.

    I have a quibble at the magnitude of the impact.   A household may have been reached twice, but they may have been two different occupants.   On a a 'potential purchaser' basis the reach is 1 for each viewer to the ad while the 'home reach' is 2.

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, Proprietor/Research Architect, Olympic Media Consultancy

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