Marketing

Advertisers are always confronted with a tightrope—how to get the most attention for their ad messages with finite resources.

Contrary to what some might tell you, striking the right balance is as much art as science. We recently encountered a situation and came up with a creative solution that illustrates this.

Our client—ALLTEL Information Services, a global technology provider to the financial industry—had encountered falling ad budgets for a number of years. Advertising with the conventional wisdom for the past 10+ years, they had been buying full-page, four-color placements. The core publication in their advertising plan was the nation’s premier financial service’s daily (called by some “The Wall Street Journal” of the financial industry). Due to budget constraints, they were now buying one full page every two weeks—or one issue in 10. In similar fashion, their full page placements in the monthly trade magazines were spread out six to eight different magazines with placements averaging every other month.

The ads weren’t making an impact. The sales force was complaining bitterly. We needed to increase effectiveness without increasing the budget.

How Frequency Impacts Recall and Response
It’s been well documented that advertising effectiveness is cumulative. In fact most readers/reviewers must see an ad six to seven times before they can recall the product being advertised.

In similar fashion, response rates increase with frequency of exposure—the often a reader has seen an ad, the more like he or she is to respond to it. Researchers of media effectiveness have noted two “response curves” (illustrated below) correlating response with number of impressions. In both cases, response rates rise with frequency, until they hit some ceiling (usually around eight to 10 impressions) and they level off.

How Size and Color Impact Recall
Another bit of conventional wisdom holds that large, full color ads attract more attention and tend to be more memorable. This conventional wisdom also happens to be correct. It’s borne out by several comprehensive studies correlating size and color to “noted” (or “remember seeing”) scores in readership studies conducted on hundreds of thousands of advertisements.

A study completed by Cahners Publishing Co., for instance, showed that “noted” scores ranged from 57% on four-color spreads down to 24% on fractional page ads. This study analyzed 109,460 ads that appeared in 57 Cahners publications between 1972 and 1992. “Noted” scores indicate the percentage of readers who remembered seeing the advertisement in the issue surveyed and represent results from 384,642 readers. Cahners mentions this study’s results were very similar to an earlier analysis that included 65,752 ads from 1972 to 1989.

The Question of Limited Resources
Obviously, if money were no object, every advertiser would simply buy double-truck spreads and be done with it. After all, that’s the configuration that predicts the greatest level of attention and recall.

But every media planner knows that money IS the object! Generating the greatest impact for every dollar invested IS the object of the game.

Particularly in this planning situation—where the budgets were quite limited and it was common knowledge that the advertising was underfunded—we had to ask the question: What if?

What if we decreased the size and color of the ad creative, and used the money freed up in order to increase frequency? What if, moving down the size/color spectrum, ad rates fell off faster than expected readership/recall rates?

If they did, we could argue that more frequent, smaller space ads would generate a greater return than infrequent, large, high color ads.

In fact, an analysis of the particular publications this client needed to buy showed this to be the case. A typical measure of value in print media is cost per thousand (CPM). To create a standardized yardstick for our ad size analysis, we factored in the average “percent noted” scores for each ad size to yield a CPMN or “cost per thousand noted.”

As you can see from the bar chart, the expected efficiency of the ad placements actually INCREASES as size and color fall. Fundamentally, this is a value proposition.

Based on this analysis, we recommended 1/3 space 1/color ads in high frequency—with 20 to 30 different creative messages. In this way we would saturate the medium with this client’s messages (three ads every week vs. one ad every two weeks) while keeping the campaign fresh with continually renewing creative.

ALLTEL was so encouraged by this thinking that it lobbied for and won a budget increase, and also went for spot color in order to increase the appeal of the ads. Several of the creative messages are shown on the following page.

The results were rapid and dramatic. ALLTEL sales representatives immediately seized on the ad campaign, embedded it into presentations and sales calls. Recognition of the company in the industry immediately went up, and the residual effects are still being felt.

One of the most memorable small space, high frequency ad campaigns ran in the Wall Street Journal during the mid-1990s for the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.

In a newspaper dominated by full-page and multi-page ads, this little campaign plugged away with dozens of 10-column-inch creative executions, each focused on one salient fact about the area’s attractiveness as a business location.

Oklahoma City registered hundreds of site selection phone calls and credited the development of 8,400 new jobs directly to the campaign. The campaign registered number one in a Roper Starch Worldwide reader survey. Would two or three full page ads have delivered the same result? Very doubtful. Examples of these ads are reprinted on the following pages as well.

In chocolates, cognac and other finer things it’s often said that less is more. Now you can see, the same may occasionally be said of advertising! To explore this concept further with our firm, we would welcome your comments or questions.