In defence of media agencies

My first thought reading the same article was that Karen doesn’t seem to understand that the focus on price doesn’t originate from media agencies it originates from client’s procurement teams.

There is a massive disconnect at the client end. They don’t seem to understand that there is an incontrivertible link between price and quality, just like in every other facet of life. The cheaper the price, the lower the quality. It’s not that hard to understand is it?

Love this! Too many people are drinking the the proprietary attention metrics kool-aid.

Great post. Attention based metrics are yet just another arbitrary metric developed assuming that all people encounter and experience media in the exact same way.

Great article. Personally I find the whole attention based metrics conversation completely baffling. Surely media has always been bought/planned/priced based on some version of attention? Otherwise pricing would be based purely on reach…. a 1000 eyeballs on a TV spot would cost the same as a 1000 eyeballs on a magazine ad. The difference in the impact they deliver (which in fairness is not all about attention) is why this is not the case

Great article. Thanks for articulating this so well. So many people like Karen espousing “attention metrics”- the experienced marketers among us recognize it as just the next thing that people are using to charge more or sell their product. #next

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field makes a big assumption (along with Joe) that when media agencies are making decisions around channel selection it is always neutral with no internal bias.
The forgotten element is that procurement departments aren’t just pushing down the cpm, but also the agency fees. So when the agency’s Commercial Director sets an internal revenue target, the easiest way to get it is through internal sales and to load the budget into the “Proprietary” planing tool which spits out the optimised media plan. The problem emerges when the plan isn’t optimised to maximising the client outcomes, rather how much budget can be allocated into the channel that delivers the best margin return for the agency which is at the detriment of the client’s business goals. We then get misguided on attention and impact vs. perceived efficiency metrics.
But, hey who cares about that, we’ve made this month’s budget, there’s a problem to deal with next month.

A great article and comments.

Where I think things are getting a bit muddled with the recent focus on ‘attention’ et. al. is that marketers are looking to find greater value with their campaign by jumping on the attention band wagon.

We have research metrics that enumerate ‘the audience’. These are estimates, and the best estimates we can provide with the given budget.

For example TV’s OzTAM provides the rating for a TV program. The data you see in the press is the ‘average minute’ for the duration of the program. That duration is based on the clock – e.g. 18:00-18:30 for a news bulletin.

OzTAM is not measuring the ads per-se, but the ad ‘audience’ is incorporated in the ‘program audience’ Think of it this way as the ‘rating’ being a meld of ‘broadcaster content’ and ‘marketer content’ … program and ads.

As is to be expected, if you dig a bit deeper you will see peaks and troughs across the program duration. Much of that variation is caused by channel changing, a ‘nature-calling’ break in the program, turning off the TV etc. Those behaviours are a sort of a de-facto indicator of attention levels.

In my experience it is almost a given that the ad-break has a lower audience than the preceding and following program content. But I think we all knew that already! What the data does not provide is how each ad performs .. i.e. ad attention. The TV ratings are not designed to provide individual ad data. When OzTAM was created some 20+ years ago it was funded by the commercial broadcasters (who own OzTAM) along with the funds from the subscribing users such as the public broadcasters, media agencies etc. A marketing information opportunity was lost.

And before I sign off, I’d like to add something that has always stuck in my memory. When metered TV ratings started I do recall an advertiser getting stuck into the Sales Director of one of the FTAs that the audience for his ad was lower than the program audience so he should get a 10% discount on the ad rates. The response was something along the lines of … we pour millions of dollars into our program, get a couple of million people watching (yes that was common the 1990s), and you put your lousy ad on and you lose a chunk of our audience, and then you want a discount … I think I will need to surcharge your ads!?!?

I was at WFA global marketer week as a top 50 brand marketer and to be clear Karen suggested that the tooling they’re creating is for media agencies to be able to justify quality media vs the race to the bottom. She specifically suggested that procurement should be focused out bottom line vs pushing lower CPM’s which force agencies hands. Am not sure where the author of this article has taken this from but everyone deserves a point of view.