EXTENDED GUIDE TO BUYING TELEVISION AIRTIME
Following up last month’s article about ‘What to look for in Creative for TV’, and after some weeks of Xmas spirit, I turn my unfocused eyes to the really tricky bit about using TV. The bit you can’t fathom or explain. The price of TV ads. And how they smother what is essentially horse trading with a lot of scientific rubbish designed to fool 22 year old marketing graduates.
Suppliers
There are three main groups you can deal with in any TV purchasing negotiation. No-one can guarantee you better deals.
TV Stations/ Groups
These purveyors of promises divide their sales team into two groups. Agency and Direct. Agency reps are trained to give lots of lurverly theoretical ‘research’ stats to young agency staff. So they sound great, but can’t do much of a deal. (And the chances are your agency will only be repeating what they say/deliver.) Direct reps are trained to get the most for spots no-one else has pre-booked, which is often quite a swathe of time slots, so they are better at doing deals. You’ll find in most cases, as a client, you’ll be fobbed off to an ad agency or buying group. You can insist on dealing direct and many do.
Media Buying Agencies/Large Ad agencies
Set up to take a slice (1-10%+), depending upon their relationship with the creative agency or client direct) the media buying agencies claim they can get you the best deals because they are the biggest in the world or South Eastern Australia or whatever. They can’t do the best deals. Because if they did, with their percentage of the total buy, the TV stations would go broke. So the deals they do are almost always the ones with more fat in them than what you can do direct.
Smaller Ad Agencies
Smaller, ‘creative’ agencies often buy under the umbrella of the big media buying
houses, claiming they are focussing on their own particular expertise and allowing the professionals to do their part. The fact is juniors usually do the work in the big media buying groups, so there’s stuff all professionalism and the best deals go to those who own the media buying houses (share holders in most cases being the big ad agencies). It’s nice for the smaller agencies to have someone else carry the credit risk, however. And if your relationship with a creative group is helped by them getting a little slice, fine.
Direct Buyers/Buy Direct
You can deal direct with any of the TV stations and get good deals. You can also bandy together with a few mates and buy in bulk. There are no rules.
How the purchase process works
You should decide who your core target market is by demographic (age, income, sex etc) and psychographic (attitudes, personality, values etc.) and even time of day viewing (Business people often watch late night. Families with young kids may often be watching TV at 700 am, but don’t expect to see those show up on a ratings analysis).
You may write it up as a brief with timings, flighting, budgets, what you want
to achieve etc. and have it ready to fax/email. Then ring the agency or station rep and go over it. Ask them to respond with their proposed buy. You’ll get that back within 24-36 hours. There will be things you don’t agree with etc., so expect to have to repeat the process a few times. You eventually agree on a buy with the agency or station (s). They send you a final you sign off. They do a credit check and off you go. They advise you about 24 hours before hand exactly when your ads will appear and if you want a list, that can be provided afterwards for your records. You’ll get 45 days or so to pay the bill, but contrary to everything you hear, this can also be flexible.
The flick factor
For sport, mention the words ‘remote control’ to a TV salesperson. They visibly quiver. The rumour is that they’ve killed any study on the ‘flick factor’ that has been proposed in the last 30 odd years since remote controls became common place in Australia. As I understand it, market research company Colmar Brunton conducted a study in New Zealand about six years ago (fewer TV stations, fewer remote controls ) where they found some 65% hit the button within 15 seconds of the ads starting.
What does this mean to you? It means they’re often not watching your ad.
As people metres need to be on the same station for 60 seconds before they record it, they don’t pick up the flick factor. (According to Neilsens. The other supplier of ratings, ATR, wouldn’t give me a straight answer to a very simple question put many times – which does make one wonder.) So you’re actually paying for people watching the show, not people watching the ad break. And you really only want them to see your ads. So you want them to watch the ad break. Is an Ally McBeal ad break worth paying for, if they’re all watching Channel 2 or surfing the other channels?
How to buy airtime
Airtime has no value other than what someone is prepared to pay for it. And airtime has a very sharp use-buy. They can’t sell an ad on yesterday’s show.
Buy on the R&F’s, not tarps.
Tarps, or Target Audience Rating Points is an easy way to confuse a 22 year old blonde media buyer. He/she thinks multiplying the reach (proportion of the ‘population’; your core target audience demographic, that’s watching the show) by the Frequency (the number of times they see the ad) works. It don’t. People seeing something only once or twice is useless. You want 60, 70 or 90% (or whatever proportion of your audience you can afford to hit) of your targets to see the ad at least 5 times. (In the 1960’s it was accepted that 3 repetitions would do, but we are over-loaded with information now.)
Frequency is fundamental
Very few customers buy on seeing an ad once. They buy when the promise is burned into their brains. When in doubt, go for more frequency with a lower reach than the reverse. You have to have absolutely sensational creative to trade reach for frequency. Better to have 50,000 people see an ad 5 times (250 tarps) than 100,000 see it three times, (300 tarps).
Buy Peak and Off Peak
Peak Time gives you heaps of viewers, which means wide reach. Off peak gives you a limited number of viewers whom you can afford to hit several times, which gives you frequency with them. Over a campaign, you’ll find you’ll also pick up quite a few of the peak customers, but slowly. Thus you build up reach & frequency most efficiently over a campaign with both.
Buy across all stations at the same time.
On the basis that they’re running the ads at the same time, which is most often the case, if you want to hit everyone you can, it’s a nice idea to book an ad on all the stations to run at exactly the same ad break. Then you know you’ve got at least one solid ‘frequency’. (See Flick Factor)
Appropriate shows
A traditionalist will tell you to buy on the shows that best suite your target market demographic and that add something from a psychological or ‘environment’ sense (ie.The Money Show, for an on-line broker’s ad etc.) Yes, if you can afford to, please do. But it’s not value for money if you can hit the same audience for a third the cost on other shows. Use your judgement and don’t be conned into paying full whack for a ‘key’ show just ’cause your boyfriend likes it.
Regularly on the shows
If you buy regularly on a show, you become associated with the show. Sometimes nice for credibility.
Buy the Top and the Tail
Because people channel surf, the best spots are the top and tail of the break. A 30 seconder for those who don’t flick, and the 15 at the other end to remind them and get the message to those who saw the first bit of the first ad and see the last bit of the 15. (As you’d know, if you’ve been doing it for 30 odd years eight or ten times an hour for 4 hours a night, you get pretty good at getting back at the end of the break.) This is the popular buy with the most seasoned TV advertisers, such as Telstra, the banks etc.
Buy the cheapest in the slot.
If you can’t afford to buy the top and the tail in the show you want, buy the cheapest ad in that time-slot, knowing full well that with the flick factor you’ve got a better than even chance of getting the audience anyway – if they surf, they may hit that station. If you’re paying less than the average cost, you’re getting the better deal.
Buy Unsold Time
As the time gets closer, the panic sets in. If you’ve got ads already running on a station, occasionally you can get them to up the number of ads they run in a particular period, which suits you, for only a very small additional cost – if air-time is not pre-sold, it can be very cheap.
Buy Direct
The Stations are prepared to sell slices of time at whatever rate they can get (as long as the big buyer’s clients don’t get wind of it). And the stations will provide whatever research you need. They get it from the same sources.
Buy Calendar Off -Peak
There are many weeks where you’re not paying to compete with an excess of other advertisers. If you’re in retail and it’s Xmas week, you have no choice, but if you’re building a brand, choose weeks/days which are less full.
Avoid ROS
Run Of Station means Spots We Can’t Sell. Unless you have a product that is wanted by people who can’t sleep or security guards don’t bother with late night, unless it’s ridiculously cheap and I mean only a couple of hundred bucks.
Screw them on price.
They will screw you to the wall when you want something, so do the reverse when you get the opportunity. Trade them off against each other and dutch auction rates. At the end of the day, a spot on a show is worth whatever you get it for. And that’s it. They will still deal with you as a buyer next month and they’ll only respect you more if you’re tough.
On length (like penises, frequency is nice but longer has more impact)
TV stations often push buys for large numbers of short length ads (Wow, they’ve offered me 100 x 15 second spots!) on bunnies because the bunnies have heard of the concept of Frequency and don’t understand that with no impact frequency means nothing. Unless they are very powerful and simple, short ads do not allow the punters to get the message, (brand, positioning or whatever). Our brains take more time to react than you think. Just cause you can see the logo in the ten second sponsorship, because you’ve seen it in the edit suite 100 times, don’t expect more than a small percentage of your customers to take it in. So don’t be talked into paying for short ads at a pro-rata rate. They are not worth it. They are nice as a value-add gift as part of your buy and to put the brand in front of the public, but have a history of being virtually useless to actually build the brand profile. See Dr Max Sutherland’s book, “Advertising, what works, what doesn’t and why.”, chapter 14 I think, for a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness, or the lack of, using short ads. Ad News or B&T should still have a few copies lying around.
Flighting
You must flight; re-run the ads regularly. Start off with a heavier buy, to build awareness, then flight or run the ads every second week or month or so to keep awareness and sales levels up. All agencies have different theories on how to do this. It does vary dramatically in certain markets, the more competitive the market, the more frequently you need to flight. It’s better not to wait until your sales wane, because most companies only see figures a month or more out of date. Keep in their face. Run ads when you think sales may be waning. I heard some idiot say the other day “I don’t like TV because you have to keep running the ads”. If they work and you get the sales, bingo. It’s like putting fuel in your car.
Regional TV – the great value option
On the basis of some sums I did recently, I’d say Regional TV is about 10 times more cost-effective than Metro TV. I can build a brand in regional Vic or NSW (audience – 1.5/2 million) for $20-40,000 in media. I need to spend 20-30 times that in Metro for an audience that’s only 3 times the size of the regional base.
Digital TV – What future?
Since the stations artfully worked it so Australia got the most technologically advanced (read: expensive) system, we will have the slowest take-up of it. This is planned because it’s better for the stations not to have too many people watching Digital – they don’t want their core business interrupted by anything pesky like better services for the public. What does it mean for you? It means you can forget worrying about ads in digital format for 3-4 years until there’s enough people with it at home.
What to do?
If I was you, I’d decide how I’d like to buy the TV, I’d then get an agency to negotiate it on an hourly rate, and ignore all the fluff the industry tries to use. In the end, you’re buying access to people’s minds. Pay for good advice, not prime time rates at full whack. TV time is not rocket science. It’s simply air time sold to the highest bidder.