What are reach and frequency? Reach is the percentage of the total target audience that will be exposed to the advertising message at least once. Frequency is the average number of times an individual in the target audience will be exposed to the advertising message.
Since this project involves selling an established product to a new market, reach would be more critical, but no more important, than frequency. If media doesn't have a budget big enough to get the best of both worlds-reach and frequency- they would opt for reach in this instance.
After the media department knows what it has to accomplish, it figures out the best way(s) to do it. This is called figuring out the media strategy. At that point, a decision is made as to where the advertising for that particular cleaning product should run: on radio, television, in newspapers, magazines, or wherever. The most intelligent and economically efficient way of reaching the people in that target market is also figured out. This could involve making a decision to run a TV commercial on one show instead of another, or a magazine ad in one publication instead of another, or to do skywriting instead of any of the above.
Most media departments in large agencies are comprised of two divisions, a planning division and a buying division. (In small agencies, often as not, everyone in the department is involved in doing everything.)
Media planners in the planning department decide what percentage of the total media budget should be spent in TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, outdoor, or any other medium, and why that media split, as it is called, would be effective.
Beyond that, planners are responsible for deciding which vehicles within a particular medium would be best to schedule. For example, let's say we're looking for a magazine in which to run ads for our cleaning product. The media planners might investigate Ladies Home Journal, among other publications, and discover that it has a CPM of $X. They might investigate McCalls and find that its CPM is $Y. (CPM is the cost of reaching each one thousand people in a target audience.) All other things being equal between those two magazines, the most intelligent way to plan the prospective media buy would be to go with the publication with the lowest CPM. (Although, if this particular situation were real instead of hypothetical, any planner with half a brain and a budget large enough would buy both of these magazines.)
Media planners also develop media tests. They show agencies and advertisers how sales are affected by increasing and decreasing media spending, and by varying media mixes. That way everyone concerned gets to see what would happen if more money were spent in television and less in newspaper, and vice versa.
Media planners also decide what media to use to introduce new products and services. When they buy radio and/or television, they decide whether to buy that medium by rating points (the percentage of total households within a given market area with radios and/or televisions), or by market share (the percentage of total households within a given market area with radios and/or televisions in use).
Media planners also have a lot to say about just which market areas should be used to introduce those new products or services, and during the course of a product introduction they determine when it's best to switch from regional media buys to network buys. This is known in the trade as picking the best time for a rollout.
Media planners have heavy responsibilities. Usually, in addition to planning all electronic media, they're also responsible for buying all non-electronic media, too.
When the planning division has determined what electronic media to buy, they give the buying division the target audience information, tell them which markets to buy and how much they have to spend. Then the planners take a rest and the buyers go to work.
Advertising agencies make most of their money through the commissions they get from media buys, and the media buyers hold the purse strings for millions and millions of media dollars. Naturally, they are courted very heavily by TV, radio, magazine, and outdoor sales people and representatives (known in the business as "reps"). When the buyers are told to make a buy, they call the media reps, get taken out for enough free lunches to choke most armies, find out what commercial time slots and print space is available, and then buy those which they feel would be most effective.
They can make those buys one of two ways, either by budget or by rating points. Buying to a budget simply means that the buyers are given a certain amount of money and they must spend all of it. Buying according to rating points means that the buyers are told to buy a certain level of exposure. This approach is often used in a media test, because you get to measure sales results in different areas under controlled conditions. You get to see how sales results are affected by increasing and decreasing the number of rating points you buy.
