Media planning is known as the process that a lot of marketers use to determine how, when, and where they will run an advertisement. The main goal is to maximize the return of investment along with engagements. Through media planning, marketers can split their budget between various offline and online channels to try and increase their ROI. Nowadays, marketing has become very competitive, and marketers need to pick the right time and channel to convey the message to their customers. When you are coming up with a media plan, you need to make the following considerations.
Conversion Goals
The Marketing Budget
Frequency of the Message
Now, let us move to the media planning process and take a closer look.
Market Research
For proper market research, you need to first work closely with the brand and understand what their marketing goals are and who their preferred target audience is. In the next stage, the media planner will start to gather and analyze the market as a whole. This includes things like research industry trends, identifying target audiences, and assessing the competition. The media planner also needs to determine the behaviors of the target group, what products they care about, and what media channels they are using every day.
Objectives
If the market research phase goes according to plan, the media planner can start to establish the media objectives. During this phase, the media planner will try to unearth information regarding which channels are going to be most effective for a particular audience. People today are consuming media from various sources and effective TV media planning, you need to find the right balance of all the sources so that your message can reach across the masses.
Budgeting
When it comes to any kind of business arrangement, the goal is simple, and it is to optimize the profit and keep the budget as low as possible. As a media planner, it is important that you deliver the brand’s message to the audience, but at the same time, it is also important that you allocate your funds cost-effectively. Going above the budget is not the only problem. Instead, budget allocation is also imperative. If you spend too much of your funds one thing, it will certainly decrease the overall outcome.
Execution
Now that you are done with the TV media planning phase, it is time to move on to the execution phase. In this phase, you are going to contact a media buyer, also known as “the executor.” The reason for this name is that the media buyer is responsible for seeing the plan through. You need to find the right media buyer, and it is the sign of any good media buyer that they are very well-versed in developing and establishing relationships with media vendors. You need to negotiate the buying of ad space. There are many factors to consider in this stage, some of which are traffic and the cost.
TV advertisements reach a lot of people, and for that reason, it is a great way to get your message across the masses. However, how successfully your paid ad campaign actually is, directly depends on how you perform in the media planning phase. There are some necessary steps that you need to follow before you go ahead with TV media planning and buying.
Define the Objective
The first step is pretty straightforward, and it is here that you need to answer the “why” question of your advertisement. There could be many reasons for you to run an ad, it could be to boost revenue, launch a new product, or to create brand awareness in general. If you know what your objective is, it can be beneficial for media planning.
During this time, you will also have to identify the reach of the advertisement. This means gauging how many people will see the message over a certain period. If you are going to use printed advertisements as well, you need to know the number of prints that are produced and sent out.
Determine Your Target Audience
The next thing that you need to do is identify your target audience. This includes income, demographics, and age group of the audience. With the help of this information, you can create a profile for the target audience. There are many ways to learn about your target audience, but one of the most effective methods is through opinion surveys. By performing the market analysis and identifying your target audience, you can predict your costs and also settle for the right media for your campaign.
Set a Budget
One of the most important factors to consider during the TV media planning process is setting the budget. You need to set a budget that can be easily followed through, and this can be done by determining your spending power and projected sales. You need to optimize your budget and stay within the constraints, which is easier said than done.
Create a Proper Message
No matter what your objective is, if you want to impress your audience, your message needs to be convincing. The creative message of an ad needs to be identified in the beginning, and you need to consider your brand voice and tonality to do so. If your objective is to generate more revenue for the brand, the call to action will be different. If the goal is different, the call to action will obviously also be different.
The Frequency of the Ad
The last step that you need to cover during the TV media planning process is determining the frequency of the ad. What this means is you need to identify the number of times you are going to show the message to your audience. This is an important aspect when you are trying to drive effective sales or enable brand recall. Now that you have a plan, it is time to execute, and this is where you buy media. Media buying refers to the space that you purchase in a particular media. At this stage, you submit the ad and make the necessary payments.
Introduction to television content, programming, scheduling, and implementation
Think of a Television set without any program or broadcast channels.
Empty and useless, right?
Television programming is the broadcast and management of television programs and software, which gives the TV Set its value and meaning, and without which the TV set would be ordinary hardware.
TV programming is the major reason people use the set. It is the most vital selling point of the television.
Successful television programming is the duty of a station or network provider, and the success cannot be achieved without the inputs of satellite, cable, and telecommunications companies. It is a mutually beneficial relationship in which the companies need the networks and vice versa.
WHAT IS TELEVISION PROGRAMMING?
Basics and meaning of television programming
Television Programming is the organization of television programs into schedules that could be daily, weekly, or seasonal. It is the in-depth planning of the kind of programs to broadcast when to broadcast, and the audience targeted for the broadcast in order to ensure optimum usage of airtime.
Television programs, which are sometimes referred to as television shows, are content particularly prepared for broadcast on the television. It could be a one-time show or production, and it could also be a part of seasonally recurring programs.
CATEGORIES OF TELEVISION PROGRAMS
The common types of television programs
Programs prepared for television broadcast are in different categories, some of which are:
News Program
Reporting of Events Coverage
Religious related program
Documentaries
Reality Shows
Music Video shows
Comedy shows
Educational Programs
Sports Programs
General Entertainment programs
Infomercials and promotional videos
Game Shows
PLANNING FOR TELEVISION PROGRAMMING
Plans and scheduling strategies used in program implementation
Plans for television programming are made by television programmers. They decide on what show to broadcast and when to broadcast the shows.
However, it is not as straight-forward as selecting shows to be aired. A lot of marketing and planning strategies are involved in television programming.
However, before strategizing on what program to broadcast, the program has to be produced first. The production of television programs is in three stages.
Pre-production stage: This stage involves everything prior to the actual shooting of the program. It includes research, ideas, writing, plans with crew and cast, costume organization, location hunting, and every other thing that would make for a successful shoot.
This stage enables one to understand the kind of program that is expected as a finished product, the accompanying problems or complications, and solutions. It is the foundational stage.
Production Stage: This stage involves the actual shoot to produce the program. It is the stage where the crew, cast, location, and equipment are managed in order to produce a perfect program.
Post-Production: The final stage is where you obtain the concluded and perfected program. It involves cutting out any unnecessary details, editing, use of effects or music, arrangements of visuals to fit a proper and approved sequence. This is a stage where the program is finalized.
Program production is just one aspect of the planning for television programming. Once this is done, the networks would have to plan on how to select programs based on considered factors. They would have to decide which programs to continue and which to cancel.
This stage of planning involves two major aspects. One is development, which includes considered factors for selecting programs and producing them into television shows. The second aspect is known as scheduling, which involves planning the lineup of the programs to attract the audience and advertisers.
Some of the following factors are often considered for the development and scheduling of television programs:
The target audience for the programming
Appropriate day and time to air shows
Audience flow to ensure that the audience is tuned in for the next program
The appeal of the show for advertisers
Production cost or cost of purchasing rights to a program
Type of program and its general appeal
Television ratings
Cost to purchase rights to particular programs
Type of program such as sitcom, drama, reality, and talk show
Television ratings
The scheduling strategies employed for television programming are such that can give shows the ability to attract and retain an audience.
They work to not only pull in the audience for the shows but to also deliver strategic audiences to the advertiser that would make their advertising have strong effects on their products.
SCHEDULING STRATEGIES AND IMPLEMENTATION
The newest and modern television programming strategies
Block programming: The strategy of scheduling a group of programs that are complementary in the same lineup. They are usually programs of the same category or genre and can be easily promoted together.
Counterprogramming involves deliberate scheduling of programs to attract an audience away from another program. This usually occurs when both programs would typically attract contrasting audiences.
Dayparting is a strategy of compartmentalizing the day into different segments in which a type of show or program appropriate for that time of the day would be broadcasted.
Hammocking involves scheduling an unpopular show in between two popular shows with the hope that the audience would be tricked into watching it.
Hot switching strategy eliminates commercial breaks in between two shows. The next show or program begins immediately after the previous show to give the viewers no chance to change channels.
The implementation of these strategies sometimes involves a combination of more than one strategy to achieve optimum results. The major aim of implementing any development or scheduling strategies for television programming is always to attract audiences, advertisers, and to increase ratings.
RSG Media Platform offers TV programmers and content producers audience data analytics that are useful in carrying out their functions.
With modern intelligent software, programmers can have access to a large database of statistics about their target audience – thanks to RSG Media!
Are you aware that watching TV is America’s favorite leisure activity?
According to data from the American Time survey, about 80% of the American population, watch TV. The survey further confirms that they spend more time on TV than they do at other leisure activities such as sports. With this large amount of TV viewers, advertisers should aim at optimizing TV ads to increase their returns.
TV advertising offers more than transactional forms of online marketing. In a Google study of 98 TV campaigns, every campaign saw a rise in product discovery after its TV ad aired.
With TV advertising, advertisers can leverage consumer attention over an extended period. They can tell stories and project values that will stick in the public’s mind. Investing in TV ads as part of your portfolio to increase your ROI is certainly a good step.
With all the money it costs to advertise on TV, optimizing your ad is very important. You should also know that TV optimization could be challenging. This is because of advertising online channels, like Google or Facebook, make tracking user behavior easy. TV, on the other hand, does not give access to such a detailed understanding of individual behavior. This makes it difficult to gauge the response. Below are a few ways by which TV ads could be optimized.
How can you optimize television ads for higher returns on investment (ROI)?
Measure the Visitors in Subsets
How can you optimize television ads for higher returns on investment (ROI)?
Technically, the challenge here is to determine whether a visitor came to a site due to a TV ad, or whether they would have visited anyway. It is difficult to do this in a deterministic way, which makes measuring visits in subsets very useful. If these subsets are measured in the short term and not long term, an inference can be drawn about TV marketing performance as a whole.
Having identified the visits that can be measured with an audience measurement system, there is a need to then understand cost and revenue on a per-visitor basis. Once there are indicators of cost and revenue, you can then make decisions about the most efficient allocation of spend-over, or different messaging to maximize revenue and minimize costs.
Capture Your Audience
Marketing To Your Target Audience
With the rise in digital ad expenses, there’s every reason to work this strategy into your advertising mix. Whichever methods you choose while optimizing your campaigns for the right platforms, don’t neglect to tell your story.
Although media platforms are not particularly designed for this, storytelling is still the most important element of advertising. You need to consider your audience and how to best communicate with them on each platform.
Analyze and Optimize Performance as You Go
Best Performing Ads = More Returns on Investment
Usually, advertisers waited weeks to measure the success of TV ads, depending solely on ratings. In recent times producers can no longer afford to wait to understand how TV initiatives perform.
When a producer knows the aspects of a TV ad that drive response and the ones that do not, he can make continuous optimizations on the former to improve performance. Depending on the TV buy, the producer can even make changes anytime. Tv rating analytics can improve the returns on your ad spent.
Make TV and Search Work Together
Offline & Online Marketing For Better Returns & Visibility
Most of the time, advertisers keep online and offline marketing initiatives separate. This stiff approach is disadvantageous. This is because there’s a strong relationship between channels, especially TV and search. TV ads have become a primary driver of digital activity, and the minutes after viewing are when consumer intent-to-buy rises.
With the right technology, producers can understand TV better. They can know what networks, programs, and genres are working, and which ones are not. Advertisers can, therefore, aim at TV audiences (segments that will respond) with customized messages hence making the best of their TV campaigns.
How about using a platform digitally designed to measure TV analytics?
Analytics Drives Success
RSG Media has one of the best tv advertising analytics platforms that managers can utilize to optimize TV advertising.
I fell in love with RSG Media tools in 2018 and their constant innovation is high-end for any data analyst compared to a lot of digital platforms out there with a lot of outdated tools.
Yes, I am rooting for RSG Media because I love innovation. Never shy away from innovation. Innovation is bound to win. Remember, optimization is king.
How statistics makes advertising on TV more Intelligent
The data streamed onto millions of devices around the world is ever-increasing and more complex. The moment a new app, media platform, or technology hits the market and becomes a popular hit; advertisers want to pounce on the edge and create the highest conversions possible.
Irrespective of the new waves of technological products that have disrupted the market, television remains an enigmatic feature that has withstood the waves and reinvented itself to adapt to this ever-changing world. Now, you can stream millions of television networks from anywhere in the world on different devices. This outstanding feature makes television an attractive, standard, and targeted for ad executives.
But how do you measure the success of your television campaigns before jumping on the next wave? Not to mention that advertisers and their clients who want every dollar spent on TV ads to count. The answer – TV Advertising Analytics and Measurement.
TV Advertising Analytics does not just apply to ad executives or marketing agencies; it offers rich data to every stakeholder.
TV rating analytics give stakeholders instant access to a mass of data. With this data, marketing executives can determine if the marketing campaign is fulfilling the purpose of brand awareness. It helps you ensure your money was well spent. TV marketing campaigns cost a lot of money, and their success or failure can affect every area of the business.
While there are certain spaces reserved for marketing and advertising such as websites or social media, TV remains the most potent medium. This is probably because TV doesn’t just elicit emotions; it creates a captive audience.
TV Advertising is the art of promoting market, product or service through television. They can be referred to as TV commercials or TV ads. TV advertising provides a large part of the funding for television networks. TV advertising has also been one significant way by which many brands have grown, and a variety of goods and services have been promoted
The Tools and a Platform
How to take advantage of user behavior data
TV Advertising Analytics is a system that is designed to measure, improve advertising, and marketing campaigns. It features reporting and analytical systems. Advertising analytics affords you with a variety of marketing reports as well as conversion data from different marketing streams to help get rid of marketing waste. By analyzing data through a set of principles, it can reveal your wasted resources and failure to maximize opportunities.
Data analysis gives credible reports rather than an ungrouped mass of codes, letters, and figures. With an advertising report, an executive can tell if the television ad campaign was hugely successful, average, or below-par. Not only this, areas of strengths, weaknesses, and competition are well analyzed with a better overview of a pragmatic way to avoid future catastrophes.
With access to enhance tools and an AI-powered platform, it is not so hard to carry out TV advertising analytics before, during, and after an ad campaign.
These tools provide extensive reports on viewership, networks, trendy or latest topics, devices or software platforms with the highest subscriptions, peak periods, and many more.
Analytic tools can provide you with an extensive database from several advertising companies or media platforms like AT&T, Warner Media, Netflix, etc. With a comprehensive report, marketing executives can draw up effective marketing plans and budget with minimal speculations and enhance their chances of local and global success.
TV Advertising Analytics is fast-growing and technologically enhanced to comprehend the dynamics of large data processed through millions of devices. To understand influential factors in the world of advertising, it is now imperative for companies and marketing agencies to stay up-to-date with the latest reports on viewership, trends, and disruptive developments in the media world.
Thinking about it; what makes popular television programs so special with viewers?
Television programming strategies are as old as television programming and can be very
effective in promoting programs broadcast on television channels, satellite or cable networks.
Undoubtedly, producers of programs want to make profits and increase the number of people
watching their programs. The more people watching a program also means more Ad dollars,
sustenance, and most likely; success.
While it sounds like a repetition to say “programming strategies”, it is quite deliberate as it
implies that more work is done than just slotting programs into different times on a program
schedule. It involves more intricate questions such as:
● How can we make an unpopular program successful?
● How can we increase advertising revenue?
● Counterprogramming to frustrate competitors
● Who exactly is watching? (audience measurement and analytics)
● Who exactly do we want to watch the program? (target audience)
● How to achieve the best ratings, etc.
Defining Television Programming Strategies
First, television programming refers to the scheduling or ordering of programs broadcast via a
television channel. It takes the format of some sort of table prepared to indicate when a program
will be aired on a television network.
However, television programming strategies are the methods and art of scheduling television
programs to achieve premium ratings, maximize revenue generated and outwit competitors. To
elaborate, a television programming strategy may be to achieve any or all of the following
effects:
● Achieve the best audience ratings
● Increase revenue generated
● Outwit or frustrate competitors: this is mostly done by counter-programming. For
instance, airing a more popular show (e.g. Keeping Up with the Kardashians) at a time-
period when a competitor is airing a less popular show could frustrate the competitor and
his program.
Factors considered when devising a television programming strategy:
Audience: The target audience is an important factor in creating a strategy. You
certainly cannot run a sitcom when people are supposed to be at work or school. It
would also be a bad idea to run a show like “America’s Got Talent” by 2 pm unless it is a
rerun. Why? The larger parts of the interested audience would likely not have time to
watch the program because of their work, school or other engagements. You would
agree that it makes more sense to run a program such as “10 hottest music videos of the
week” at that time.
Ratings: Ratings is one of the most popular ways to know the audience’s feelings and
reactions towards the program. Bad ratings would mean “new strategy needed”. It is
important to conduct ratings analytics to understand what exactly is wrong and needs to
be improved. On the other hand, good ratings would mean more ad revenue, more
people watching, etc.
Flow: This refers to the sequence of programs on the television schedule. Many
program scheduling managers often use this tactic to promote programs. For instance,
an upcoming or new program may be scheduled after a very popular program like a
basketball game featuring the Chicago Bulls or a popular show like “The Big Bang
Theory”. Chances are a large part of the audience would not switch channels so soon
and give the new program a huge platform to convince them to keep watching.
Competitors: What other television broadcasting networks are showing at the same
time or before the program can easily determine the fate of your television program. It is
best to find out that your program is not coming up against a real heavyweight or it will
be a total knockout.
Time-Period: This is very crucial in program scheduling. News Flashes or Interviews
sell at almost any time but not comedy shows or sitcoms. No matter how beautiful a
program is, a wrong time-period may spell its early doom.
Television programming strategies are quite important in modern television scheduling. A wrong
or negative strategy may prove very costly for the broadcasting station as millions of dollars may
be lost in the bad run. Many modern television producers or content schedulers often conduct a
whole lot of research before slotting a program to a particular time period to avoid premature
exit.
However, with the aid of intelligent software and television programming professionals, many
broadcast networks can optimize each program on their list.
Television ads have been around long enough and have been major revenue generators for TV companies. However, in recent times, TV viewing has declined while content owners and distributors are directing their focus to digital service platforms. However, there is still a large amount of money vested into traditional cable and satellite, which is to say TV ads can still be the starlight.
A TV ad is also called a television commercial, TV advert or simply an advert. It is a brief portion of time paid for by an organization to be aired during a television program. It carries a message and it is targeted to market a product or service.
Three main tasks are involved in producing TV commercials;
a. Creating a television advertisement that meets the standard of broadcasts
b. Placing the advertisement on television to reach the targeted customer
c. Measuring the proceeds of these ads, including the return on investment (ROI)
Advertising revenue has provided large portions of the funding for most television networks that are privately owned whilst promoting a wide range of goods and services.
A sales log is a record kept by a company for the purposes of monitoring and forecasting. Various sets of data and information as they relate to sales are kept for use in the future as the need arises. Keeping track of various transactions and values in sales is important in any business. This record-keeping procedure is very important in the TV commercial business because a loss or unrecorded data would affect the smooth operation of the company and the achievement of its goals.
Sales logs contain relevant information which is helpful in getting a clear and broad overview of the amount of revenue generated by sales. Sales logs are very important tools in revenue generation because they provide information critical in various forecasting procedures that rely on sales history to generate and anticipate trends. In spite of the importance of sales logs as well as the importance of their generation and optimization, some firms do not understand them and fail to fully optimize them.
It’s not that television advertising is going to be extinct, but the TV ad business model is in a time of major transition. Yes, we all still gather around to watch ads but things have definitely changed from when one TV ad could transform a company’s sales numbers. Although TV advertising is still one of the most effective ways to create awareness about a product or brand, TV ad spending is moving to the digital realm and media companies are working to find digital solutions. The sales log optimization promises real-time results with its seamless and integrated solutions.
In the sales log optimization, TV ad spot scheduling for cable and broadcast is optimized using proprietary audience scheduling logs to deliver guaranteed deals more efficiently. Forecasting accuracy using the sales logs is a great optimization model. Since the sales log can be created in little time it allows flexibility, making changes based on campaign criticality or targeted goals.
It is possible to maximize the use of a sales log in boosting the sales of TV ads by building on the information currently owned about the customers. If Television companies can implement this model successfully, optimization of the sales log could be the pathway to a resurge of TV ad sales.
Advertising 