People-First Media Planning: How Thinking About People, Not Devices, Allows For Greater Reach

Due to the fragmentation of media, it’s increasingly hard to reach people at scale. As the mobile phone and the tablet have taken their place alongside the TV, the radio and the computer for people’s attention, there are an ever-increasing number of channels for consideration within a media plan. The change is a convenient and rewarding one for consumers - but an increasingly complex and challenging one for marketers. Although people may still be watching as much or more TV than they previously did, it’s becoming harder for marketers to reach the same scale of people within their budgets, as the number of TV channels broadcasting shows increases at a greater pace than population growth.

At the same time, we’re also seeing the mobile phone account for an increasing share of our media consumption compared to TV. Millward Brown estimates that video consumption in the UK is now split pretty evenly between live TV (33%), TV on demand (30%), mobile (24%) and desktop (14%)1, but as marketers we need to remember that the consumer experience on TV, tablet, mobile and desktop is very different. In the UK, 28 million people, or 43% of the population, visit Facebook every day on their mobile phone, and 31 million across devices2. Globally, Facebook is delivering more than 100 million hours of video to its users every day.

The role that channels like Facebook and Instagram – still relatively new in media terms, especially for video – can play for advertisers has an opportunity to be better understood. Do these channels help marketers reach the people they need to, and, if they do, are they effective? To help us answer these questions for marketers, we work with Nielsen, which helps advertisers understand the way TV and digital media work together via their Total Ad Ratings (TAR) measurement solution.

To answer the question of audience reach in relation to Facebook, we commissioned Nielsen to analyse the reach relationship between Facebook and TV on 25 campaigns across 2014 and 2015 that ran on both TV and Facebook. Nielsen found that Facebook is able to complement TV by reaching an additional 5.0% of the population that is currently being missed by the average campaign. This is highest among the treasured target audiences of 18-24s and 25-34s, where Facebook reaches an average of 22.6% and 14.0% respectively. This is 1 in every 8 people in Britain.

Against the target audiences of these 25 campaigns, the incremental reach rose to 16.1%. This means that 1 in 6 people within a target audience are seeing a campaign on Facebook and not on TV.

To market effectively among multi-device and device-agnostic consumers, brands want coherent campaigns that are channel-agnostic and reach the audience where they choose to spend their time, in a way that engages them. Based on this insight, we at Facebook believe a marketer should be planning video via an integrated media plan that brings together TV, VOD and digital video into a single coherent whole. Consumers don’t distinguish between these channels and nor should brands. Facebook is as relevant a channel for video as any other that consumers choose to use.

We work closely with some of the largest video advertisers in the UK, and as such we help measure their campaigns that are planned this way. Lucozade commissioned Facebook as part of their 2015 Rugby World Cup sponsorship, which targeted men aged 13 to 34 years old. Nielsen was able to show them that Facebook’s incremental contribution to their campaign reach was 21.2% of their target audience. Had they not used Facebook, they would have missed 2 million of the 7.2 million people in the target audience who they reached on TV and Facebook. This was done at a CPM 14X lower than TV, and drove significant uplifts in cut-through and association between Lucozade and the key message.

Similarly, we were commissioned by Iceland on their Power of Frozen campaign in May and June 2015. Here we were able to reach a further 10.3% of the target audience who were not reached by the 1,200+ GRP TV campaign, delivering reach 2.5X more cost-effectively than the TV campaign.

Gone are the days when campaigns can be planned by device. An increasing number of advertisers believe that the concept of separate TV and digital plans is no longer a logical approach to planning video campaigns. Instead, they think ‘digital’ should represent the opportunity available to planners to convey their key messages to a greater number of people, in the environment their audiences choose to spend their time. Consumers don’t distinguish between devices, and nor should brands.

To learn more about creating great video content that works alongside TV, check out our FBIQ insights site.