On Reach

The other week I read somewhere about "a crisis in reach." There is no crisis in reach. (If the media numbers bother you that much just go and buy a national OOH campaign.) What there is on the other hand is a crisis in understanding what exactly the word "reach" means.

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At risk of turning this blog into the Ladybird Book of Media Planning, let’s go back to basics. Reach is the percentage of the target estimated to have had an opportunity to see the campaign or ad at least once. It a hard concept to grasp. What is hard, and what is therefore duly ignored, is the notion that it really wise to compare apples to oranges.

Ask yourself, or indeed your favorite sales rep, the following questions:

You say I will reach 80% of my target with this video campaign. Can you explain what you mean by 'reach?'"

"Ah, so 80% will see my ad. For how long?"

"If in my judgement two seconds is insufficient to get my message across, what proportion saw, say, 10 seconds?"

"When you say 'see,' what exactly do you mean? Is it they see the program or block in which the ad appears, or the ad itself?"

"Does the number refer to the device, or the person using the device?"

The point is that the answers depend on where you are in the world (our U.S. friends still largely speak of program performance, not ad break or ad performance) and of course which particular channel is being used.

This goes back to the issue of definition. What is a viewer, and what criteria do you need to satisfy in order to qualify as one?

Advertisers really don't care about reach, impressions or ratings except as staging posts along the way to sales. If "x" reach leads to "y" sales then great, but what matters at the end of the day is the "y" sales.

Further, it may very well be that less reach, however defined but made up of exposures in quality environments that are not just "seen" but noticed, is what really matters.

I know it can be tedious delving back in history to make a point but when the great Mike Yershon sold his client Fiat on only advertising in center breaks, in ITV’s main news and only ever first in break, "reach" was not the only concept on his mind.

Mike and others like him knew well, rigorous research evidence or not, that noticeability counted, and while it is easy to say if no-one has the opportunity to see the ad then by definition no-one could notice it, that assumes we cannot keep two concepts in our heads at the same time.

In a forthcoming asi podcast interview, my Crater Lake colleague David Beaton from the advanced analytics business Navigation makes this point very well.

David suggests that quality of exposure matters a lot when it comes to assessing eventual outcomes.

Paul Feldwick, in his excellent book Why Does the Pedlar Sing? does much the same when he refers to the power of fame.

You get to be famous by being noticed -- not (just) by reaching some poorly defined media metric that is only there to help inform what is at the end of the day a refined guess, an estimate.

Media metrics like reach are a staging post along the way, a means to an end -- not the end in itself.

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