A narrower definition of the TRP could provide a panacea for advertisers and agencies that are hard-pressed to increase budgets to match the price increases media owners have introduced in the current upfront marketplace. Better-defined TRPs will drive business outcomes more cost-effectively.

CBS and Nielsen have found that advertisements reaching a high concentration of consumers who purchase specific product categories have a significantly higher correlation with sales outcomes. Thus, advertisers facing budgetary constraints could benefit by using better-defined TRPs in their media negotiations.

By contrast, advertisers that continue to focus on broadly defined GRPs reaching audiences outside of their targets may only satisfy general awareness outcomes among audiences ill suited to becoming good customers. Advertisers who pour their media budget into better-defined, TRP-focused inventory will reduce waste. The corollary to this is that, when an advertiserb?s goal is increased product sales, buying GRPs without a narrow target produces significant waste.

Several steps are required to shift to more narrowly defined TRPs as a core media negotiation focus. Many of these steps were impossible to accomplish until recent advances in data collection and processing. They include:

• Aggregation of sales data, which may come from a syndicated data provider or a retailer
• Aggregation of granular viewing data, using either respondent-level or set-top box-based data sets
• Identification of best- fit statistical models correlating audiences and sales data
• Development of predictive algorithms which identify future audience behaviors
• Negotiation of units of inventory which over-index against those target audiences

Buyers and media directors alike know that the traditional response to increases in the price of media is to downgrade the mix of programming on a media plan, using less network inventory and more run-of-schedule cable inventory. Clearly, using better-targeted TRPs is superior at both a tactical and strategic level, although it will inevitably require different competencies, technology providers and ad sales models. But advertisers looking to manage against the very real constraints they face will work to make this model happen and significantly improve the efficiency of their media budgets as a result.

Some highlights:

• Dave explains matter-of-factly how Simulmedia believes TV advertising can be better. Simply put, while the traditional way of buying media works, we believe we can improve it by separating the people from the program.
• He puts the magnitude of data that Simulmedia manages into context: every day, we process 70 million hours of anonymous television viewing data in support of the predictive algorithms that find audience targets for our clients
• He describes the importance of people watching Everybody Loves Raymond on a Wednesday to movie studio marketing Romantic Comedies
• He discusses the accolades web?pve received for our work with CBS promoting the series premiere of Hawaii Five-O.

Thanks for the interview Beet.TV and considering us amongst the folks at the root of the media revolution.

This September, CBS and FOX each used early-season NFL games to promote various new programs, including the following:

For each promotional campaign, networks placed a small number of promos during NFL games, and the reach of these spots was very large:

NFL games draw huge numbers of viewers, so a tiny number of promos wound up reaching a significant portion of the total audience reached by the entire campaigns.B Moreover, a large number of these NFL viewersbover 700,000 STBs in each casebwas unique, and did not see the promotion at any other time during the campaign.

It is clear that NFL games allow program marketers to efficiently reach a huge number of viewers.B Better yet, these viewers often have not otherwise seen the promotion, so new people are exposed rather than simply hitting the same viewers over and over again.B The final question deals with response rates.B Do football fans exposed to promotion respond positively, or are they poor targets of promotion who watch lots of football but nothing else?

The answer appears to be the former: NFL fans respond positively to promotions for new shows.B Series premiere response rates for promos during NFL games are nearly as high as response rates for all promos.B If we exclude same-day promos, NFL viewers actually had higher response rates than average among all exposed viewers (in three of the four examples):

As we see, NFL games are a great opportunity to reach large numbers of new viewers who will respond positively to promotion.B Networks value these viewers so much that they pay the NFL billions of dollars for game rights.