Unlike traditional media; the digital medium doubles up as a medium for transaction i.e. apart from its key role as a carrier of messages (medium as medium), the digital medium is a carrier of currency too (medium as channel). It scores well on helping marketers integrate marketing and business. Marketers swear by the medium as it delivers business leads and with CRM integration, they can actually give traditional media a go by. Despite the obvious advantages, many brands use digital for impressions (exposure) or clicks (engagement) instead of conversion (leads) – especially as they aren’t fully capable of converting/ managing the leads they get. This indicates digital’s potential is far more than what it’s being tapped for.
Today 40% of global adex is on digital. With a rapid rise in people online and a huge growth in the digital ecosystem (apps, shared platforms, communities, blogs, social media, smart phones and connected devices), this was inevitable. However, this rise has been rapid and not as systematic as other media like TV/ Radio. In other words, a teenage (yes, the civilian use for the World Wide Web is just about getting out of its teens) boy has been given the responsibilities of a middle-aged man. Consequently, we are seeing a few major issues that affect brands that evangelize the medium – this is best understood when we compare traditional media planning (on TV/ Print/ Radio/ OOH/ Cinema) against digital (search/ social/ mobile/ display/ iVideoetc) media planning.
Traditional: Established industry norms for reference databases/ data sources
Digital: Widely varying reference sources/ changing database references/ norms
T: Data led benchmarks – arrived at with humans drawing inferences
D: Machine led benchmarks – ghost calculated/ served for humans to follow
T: Plans evaluated for a surrogate plan in recent similar campaign period
D: Machine generated plan evaluations
T: Fixed currency for plan evaluations (CPT/ Reach/ Freq etc.)
D: Widely varying currencies – different across social/ search/ display/ iVideo/ mobile/ digital content
T: Evaluation parameters/ norms remain valid over long periods of time
D: Norms change over short periods
T: 3rd party data/ physical proofs to validate media partner proof of delivery
D: Media partner/ publisher data used to certify ‘proof of execution’
T: External data used to arrive at segmentation/ set target audience, market priority, source of business, media mix etc.
D: Data provided by publishers used to define segments, audience definitions, market size, competitive clutter etc
T: Category/ competition spend estimates from 3rd party database
D: Category media activity through manual search/ tabulation
IMPLICATION:
It’s important we know key data/ currency/ method limitations of Digital Media Planning – this helps deal with a powerful medium like digital, better.
We must make efforts at building common currencies/ norms that help compare cross-media ROI / effectiveness.