Launch an Advertising Campaign

After having completed the creative brief with your advertising agency, you now approach your media agency to book the advertising space. 

Not all advertisers work with a media agency, but it is still quite common to do so! Media agencies help you determine your ad campaign timeline and select the media that will be used.

Choose the Right Media

First, find out what your options are! Legal issues, timing, or availability constraints may already rule some media out for you.

Then, narrow down your options further, based on two more factors :

• Flexibility - Some media are more adaptable than others during the campaign. It might be difficult to change tactics in an outdoor campaign, unlike a digital advertising campaign. Is this important to you?

• Creative scope - How well does the media allow you to match your campaign's desired tone and atmosphere? Are there some creatives choices that rule out certain avenues?

Finally, weigh your remaining options based on the following four factors that will help you assess each media option's value for your campaign.

1. Reach (or coverage) - How many people will the media reach?

2. Affinity - Is there a clear match with your target audience? 

3. Frequency - How often are people likely to be exposed to your message, on average?

4. Cost - There are several different ways to measure this (as you'll see in the third part of this course). In digital marketing, you might come across:

   • Cost per thousand (CPM) impressions, which is the cost per 1000 times someone might see your advertisement. 

   • Cost per action (CPA) - also known as cost per acquisition - is a measure where you only pay for a defined action, such as registration for more information or a purchase.

   • Cost per click (CPC) is where you pay only when someone seeing the ad clicks on it.

    

🥤 Discover How Bio Boost Narrowed Down Their Options

Bio Boost🥤 wants to launch a campaign that targets men aged 25 - 45. The company has two media options for a campaign, running a series of digital ads on either of the following newspapers:

• Newspaper A (News A)

• Newspaper B (News B)

They've already narrowed down their options based on legal, timing, availability, flexibility, and creative constraints, and now they need to make their final choice.

Let's run some numbers to see which one makes the most sense for them, based on the remaining factors: reach, affinity, frequency, and cost.

Reach 

Here, you need to predict how many people will see your ad, based on what each newspaper can promise you in terms of audience.

Affinity

Next, look at how much of the newspaper's audience matches your target audience. You can find out by digging further into each newspaper's audience statistics, and your media agency can help you with this.

The proportion of your audience that matches your target audience is called your useful audience.

News B is still winning here! They have a higher percentage of audience that fit Bio Boost's target audience.

Frequency

To a certain extent, the more often consumers are exposed to messages, the more the messages stick. It's also important to consider if one newspaper has a system of showing the ad more times to their readers - or if they return to the website several times.

However, you can't be sure that the same people will see all assets, so you need to make for allowances for this too.

In the following two tables, you'll see how audience and frequency build in two different scenarios. In the first, 90% of the people who see an edition are repeat readers - in other words, a loyal audience who read the weekly newspaper every week, for example. In the second, that figure is just 50%. Look to see how reach and frequency develop:

Scenario 1 - 90% Loyal Audience 

To explain how this works: 90% of the people seeing the second placement will already have seen the first - leaving just 10% to have the first view. In the third placement, once again, 10% will be first-time viewers. Second-time viewers are those who saw the ad for the first time in the second placement (90% of the people). That leaves 90% of the people who had their second view at the second placement and will see the ad for the third time.

Now compare that to the second scenario, where 50% of the audience is new at each step.

Scenario 2 - 50% Loyal Audience 

Notice this time that we've reached many more people (2 million vs. 1.2 million) with our 3 million opportunities to see (OTS). Still, the number of people who've seen it two or three times is significantly lower.

One final point: watch out for audience duplication when running your advertising in two different places. How many people read both News A and News B? You need to calculate the net audience - a similar calculation to the one above.

Cost

Finally, it turns out it is more expensive to run a campaign on News B.

But could it be that it's still a more worthwhile campaign? This is when the useful audience needs to be taken into account. You'll need to calculate the cost per thousand of the useful audience. 

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By measuring the CPM of reaching your target audience for each medium, you can rank each medium's cost.

In the end, News B works out to be the best option. 🏆

Let's Recap!

• Narrow down your options based on legal, time, availability, flexibility, and creative constraints.

• Use these additional factors to determine which media are most appropriate and what proportion of your target you will reach - and how often!

  • Reach

  • Affinity

  • Frequency

  • Cost

• Calculate your audiences and select the media that seems most appropriate to you to emerge from the media mass and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Now that you've made your media selection, we will explore how you'll use these media to get your message across in the next chapter.