Advertising Nugget: Reach & Frequency Matter

by Scott Howard | Jul 26, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Reach & Frequency Matter.

There is an age old advertising nugget that has been lost over the years.

Or perhaps (and I shudder to think this is the real reason), it simply isn’t taught anymore.

What is this advertising nugget?

Reach and Frequency Matter.

Before I go any further, I should explain what those two terms mean.

Reach is how many different people your message will reach.

Frequency is how often an individual person will see/hear/read your message.

Let’s talk about this reach and frequency concept in an every day scenario first:

You order a large Pizza.  How many pieces of pizza do you have and how many people can you serve?

If the pizza is sliced into 16 pieces, then the maximum number of people you can serve is 16.  Everyone will get some, but no one is going to be full.

Eight people could each have two slices, or 4 people could have 4.  You can do the math and come up with possibilities.

Reach is the total number of people who get at least one piece of pizza.

Frequency is how many slices of pizza each person gets.

For someone with a small appetite, they may only want 2 slices.  But we all know someone that will always want that last piece because it takes a little more for them to feel full and satisfied.

Now, let’s take this reach and frequency discussion into the media and marketing world.  And I’ll use the Pat Miller Program on WOWO radio as my first example.

We recently received information that there are over 50,000 adults that listen to the Pat Miller Program every week on WOWO between 3 and 6pm, weekdays.   That number is the total potential reach of a commercial during his program who live in and near Fort Wayne, Indiana.

By the way, the Pat Miller Program is the most listened to radio program weekday afternoons for grown ups.

All of this is great news and important for businesses that want to invite Pat Miller Program listeners to become their customers. Why? Because there are a whole heck of a lot of them!  That’s the reach factor in action.

The other part of the equation is Frequency.  If you want to run just one commercial per week, the maximum frequency is always going to be one, no matter how many total people hear your commercial, if it only plays one time, then there is no way the frequency number can be greater than one.

In our pizza scenario, when you have 16 slices of pizza and share with 16 people, the frequency is also just one.

Just as one slice of pizza usually isn’t enough to feed a hungry pizza lover, one commercial per week isn’t enough in most cases to make a strong impact and convince Pat Miller Program listeners to spend money with you.

That’s why buying one commercial per week on the Pat Miller Program on WOWO Radio is not an option I offer.

Studies over the past 50 years have said we need an average frequency of 3 to 9 times exposure to an advertising message before we act.  In the past decade each of us are exposed to more and more marketing messages than ever before.  Some say that each of us see or hear over 10,000 marketing messages per day.  Before the internet, that number was just a fraction, maybe 3,000 marketing messages per day.

Thankfully, our brains have a filtering mechanism that prevents us from being overwhelmed by all of this on the conscious level, but depending on the impact of certain marketing messages, many are stored in our subconscious where they are forgotten until we need to remember them.

An example in my life was a few years ago when I needed to call a garage door repair person and an old business card that I had not paid attention to for years came to mind and that company was the one I called to fix a broken spring at our new home.

Let’s review. Reach is the total number of individuals that can be reached by a particular marketing message.  There are limits and you should understand this when you are deciding what advertising programs to invest in.

Frequency is the number of times an individual person will see or hear your marketing message and it corresponds with the number of ads you run for a particular audience.

It’s the combination of these two numbers that are key factors in the success of your advertising expenditures.  If you don’t know what these numbers are for the advertising you are currently doing or are considering doing, stop.  Make this a priority to find out.  Once you find out these numbers and understand then you can make smart decisions about how to invest your marketing and advertising money.

I’ll be glad to help you figure this out too.  I know you are busy and it can get confusing.

One side note about frequency and the success of advertisers on WOWO Radio. I spent nearly a decade in Detroit working with local businesses on their radio advertising and twice as much time doing the same in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Most of the stations I worked for before WOWO were music based stations.  WOWO is a news talk radio station with not just a huge audience but a very devoted audience.  The number of ads I would need to air for a company on a music based radio station is higher than the number of ads per week I need to air on WOWO because of the loyalty of WOWO’s audience.

Also factoring into the success of  WOWO Advertising is the nature of the news and talk format.  Pat Miller Program listeners (as well as listeners to all of our programs) are active listeners tuning into the spoken words of Pat and others.  This helps them also pay attention to the spoken words in the advertising.   I’ll share more on this in the future.