Have Your Agency Buyers Taken Control of the Media Buy Stewardship Process?February 22, 2010
Spot television time buying is an exhilarating and complex business. The buyer’s job consists of a mix of different tasks across each phase of the media investment cycle:
- Forecasting audience delivery of television programs based on Nielsen data
- Negotiating the price to be paid for ads placed in those programs
- Stewardship, following the buy through its life as new ratings data arrives, station schedules change and real life takes over.
To do the job well, buyers must be equipped with the requisite tracking tools and be prepared to sweat the details, continually revisiting schedules as new information becomes available.
Like economists and stock brokers, the savvy buyer knows all too well that past history may not provide a reliable indication of future performance. Fortunately, they do have the means to do something about it. New audience research arrives in the metered market overnights and monthly sweeps reports, providing critical intelligence required to revisit their estimates and make mid-course corrections, hopefully timed to keep the buy on track before the campaign is over. In the end, the post analysis confirms or denies the accuracy of their forecasts. If they met the goal, that’s great. If not, it’s not uncommon to blame the messenger, whether it be the stations or the good ole Nielsen Media Research.
Nielsen is a good target for the agencies. Of course, as a dominant supplier of media measurement data, you’d expect agencies to share some tough talk about ratings methodologies, sample sizes and the inadequacies of the system. But the criticism is often leveled at the statistics behind the ratings.
Few buyers really understand the technical details, simply locking onto “standard error” statistics that represent the apparent accuracy of reported estimates. Think of it as a parallel to the pollster’s qualification – our predictions are accurate plus or minus X percent… In effect, you might look at Standard Errors as a way of conveying how much bounce or variability we can expect from report to report as the ratings are released.
Differences between the buyers’ estimates and the final reported results reflect four factors:
- The statistical reliability of the ratings themselves
- Real changes in viewing behavior over time (apart from statistical issues)
- The buyers’ estimating capability (how good they are at estimating)
- Stewardship, the process of maintaining buys throughout their lives.
We can’t do much about statistical error or viewers changing what they watch. Training, oversight and experience are the obvious courses of action to assure buyers are up to the task. That said, stewardship is a critical element in assuring that an advertiser’s media schedule delivers what people paid for.
The Benefits of Aggressive Stewardship
As new ratings information is published, buyers have an opportunity to re-forecast estimated delivery for their schedules, taking into account ads that have already run and those yet to run. If the ratings are up versus their estimates, they are in good shape. If not, they have the opportunity to work with stations to change their schedules, shifting out of under-performing programs, upgrading to better-performing programming or negotiating bonus units to assure they will ultimately achieve their goals.
Flexibility isn’t unlimited, but the more aggressive buyers are in stewarding their buys, the more they stand to gain. This not only protects their clients against the consequences of an imperfect ratings system, but also allows them to adapt to a host of issues that affect whether schedules run properly – program preemptions, spots run with the wrong creative, stations simply missing spots, etc.
Advertisers and their agencies have a choice when it comes to due diligence in their spot television buying. They can roll the dice, simply waiting until buys are over to find out whether they got what they paid for and met their goals, or, they can steward their buys to make every effort to assure that under-delivery is addressed throughout the life of the buy.
It’s your company’s hard earned money. What would you do?
