Advertising Options: Comparing Apples & Oranges

by Scott Howard | Apr 6, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom

As a business owner or marketing manager, you want to be smart with your advertising dollars and get the most bang for the bucks you spend.

There are plenty of options, some better than others depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

But first let’s clarify what everyone is trying to accomplish:

Reach potential and current customers with your marketing and advertising message so they will buy from you.

Or in even simpler terms:  You want to invite people to spend their money with you.

Media and Marketing people have all kinds of ways to try and convince you that what they are selling is going to be the best thing ever for you.  Today, I’m going to challenge one of those tactics.

First, look at this chart from MarketingCharts.com that lists time spent with various media:

Pretty impressive for Television and Radio, as far as total number of people viewing and listening, right?

But while this is interesting in broad terms, it’s not a measurement of how many people are seeing or hearing ads, is it?

Comparing Apples and Oranges can be confusing if you are at grocery store but it is even more confusing if your media sales person tries to sell you their solution without giving you the right info to compare.

Let me cut to the chase.  You really want to know how many people will see/hear your ad and how often.  This is the data that is relevant to your business, not the data in that chart.

I’ll dig deeper and explain.

My house has cable TV and we have over 100 channels.  My wife will watch up to 20 of these channels each month.  She has 7 favorites.  She will often use the commercial breaks to get up and do something  and there are some ads that are so annoying that she will flip the channel just so she doesn’t have to watch them.  She will also attempt to watch two shows at the same time by flipping back and forth.

She also listens to the radio, mostly in the car but at home too.  She can pick up 20 stations in her car if she wants to but she only listens to 3 or 4 each month, with 1 primary station.

This is the information that really matters, not the info in that chart.  Most credible media people can use this kind of data and give you a projection on what really matters,  how many people will see/hear your ad and how often.  

Want help comparing or finding out if your media person is giving you info that matters to your business?  Contact me, and I’ll help you sort it out and provide you with the questions you should ask.