In the series TV advertising for first time advertisers, we have covered the following topics till date:
- TV Advertising Facts & Figures: Useful facts and figures about television viewership and advertising in India, curated from reports by leading bodies like BARC, TAM, and EY.
- TV Campaign Measurement Terms Explained: How TV programs and campaign viewership are measured in India and some relevant terms that can help advertisers know more about the TV viewership measurement.
- Data-driven Television Campaign Planning: The process of television advertising planning in brief and also explore how data obtained from authentic bodies like BARC can help us in making the right choice about television campaign planning
- Competitor Analysis Report: How a competitor analysis report can help brands understand the advertising strategy followed by the top players in the category.
- How a post-evaluation report can help brands optimize their TV campaigns: A case study
In this article, we would try to understand how brands can use channel share report, time band report as well as program report to understand the viewership behavior of their target audience and accordingly, select the channels to run their ads on.
Learning through example
If you remember our previous article based on the competitor analysis report, we considered an example of edtech category. Going forward with the same category, in this article, we would consider an imaginary brand E, that offers a variety of courses for school students as well as working professionals. The courses range from school curriculum to hobbies as well as vocational/professional courses for students and working professionals. The target group is All India Urban NCCS AB Age group 25-45 that would comprise of both young parents as well as working professionals. The brand wants to carry out a branding campaign on television. In this article, we would analyze the following reports to know which channels, time bands, and programs would be the best to place ads in for Brand E:
- Channel Share Report
- Time Band Report
- Program Report
Knowledge from the previous articles
In the last article, we discussed the various steps in TV campaign planning. Following is a flowchart with all the underlying steps.
If you remember our last article and the article before that, the TV campaign planning process started with the brand sharing a brief description of the brand/product, the core target group, the target market, the message that they would like to convey and the campaign objective. The media agency works on the brand brief and comes up with a media brief.
If you remember our last article and the article before that, the TV campaign planning process started with the brand sharing a brief description of the brand/product, the core target group, the target market, the message that they would like to convey and the campaign objective. The media agency works on the brand brief and comes up with a media brief.
- We analyzed past TV viewership data for advertisements run by edtech brands to know more about edtech brand advertising on TV and decided to focus on Brand A, the market leader in terms of advertising with a 95% SOV.
- Top 3 genres for brand A were News, Kids and GEC with more than 50% GRPs coming from HSM, followed by AP/Telangana and English speaking audience. Brand A maintained a 60:40 ratio between Prime Time and Non Prime Time ad spots. Average ad duration for brand A was 30 seconds.
Channel Share Report: Finding the best channel mix for brand E to advertise
As the name suggests, channel share report tells the brand, what is the share of reach of each channel among it’s target audience in the target market in a given period. For this article, we will consider the target audience demographics as Male Female Age 25-45 years NCCS AB and market as Urban India. The time period considered is week 32 and 33.
How to use Channel Share Report?
After we obtain the channel share report, the next question is: how would you want to use it for deciding on the channels where you would like to place your television ads. Based on the business requirements, brands can opt for various strategies for zeroing in on the channels. Some of the popular strategies are as follows:
- Based on Channel share: To maximize reach
- Based on Affinity: To minimize wastage
- Based on CPRP: To minimize cost
Before we dive deeper into the individual channels, let’s see which content genre, language and resolution this set of audience prefer as compared to the TV universe.
If we see the pie charts above, we know that there is no significant difference in the genre-wise viewership behavior between our target group and the universe. The viewership of movies is slightly lesser while news viewership is slightly more.
In the next chart, we would see the difference in the viewership behavior in terms of language/market.
Again in the charts above, we don’t see a significant difference in the viewership pattern. The top five markets remain the same with slight difference in share. Apart from the Hindi speaking belt, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra are the top markets.
In the next chart, we would see if our target group prefers HD channels more than an average TV viewer.
As we can see, our target group has a preference for HD channels.
In the charts above, we analyzed the behaviour of our target group against the TV universe. In the next section, we will go through the three strategies discussed earlier. While the actual TV planning process is a little more complex than this, we would just look at the top ten channels using each of these strategies to see what it means.
#1: Sorting on the basis of Channel Share
This is very simple to understand. We just sorted the channels in the decreasing order of channel share among the target audience and market. And we got the following result:
As expected, popular GEC channels hold the top spot. If the brand goes by this plan, the total share of market covered would be greater than 23%. However, the majority channels listed here are HSM channels with only two Tamil and one Telugu channels. In case a brand would like to reach non-HSM areas too, they can pick the regional channels with the highest share from the list. Following are the pros and cons of this strategy:
Pros:
By advertising on these channels, brands can reach out to the maximum number of people
Cons:
Selecting only the top popular channels may cost very high to the brands.
There are chances of very high spillage.
For example, if channel X has a 5% share among our TG and channel Y has 2% only. Say the TG has only 100 people which means 5 people in the TG watch channel X and 2 people only watch channel Y. Let’s say channel X has a total viewership of 50 people and channel Y has a total viewership of only 10 people. Then, in the case of advertising on channel X, the relevant audience would be only 5 and the non-relevant audience would be 45 while in the case of channel Y, there would be only 8 non-relevant audiences as compared to 2 relevant audiences. The next strategy can take care of this.
#2: Sorting on the basis of channel affinity
Channel affinity is a simple ratio that tells the affinity of a set of audiences towards a channel as compared to other sets of audiences. In this case, we would keep the channel share for our TG as the numerator and the channel share of the universe as the denominator. Channels having an affinity score of more than 1 are channels preferred more by the TG as compared to the universe. On sorting the channels based on affinity, we got the following results.
In the table above, we can see how the results vary from the previous sorting. These channels though have a high affinity score but have a very less channel share.
Pros:
Minimal spillage
Cons:
Going by affinity score only may not be effective as sometimes, like in the case above, all the popular channels have been missed out.
One of the best practices would be to consider both. For example, let’s consider channels who have an affinity score of above 1.5 only and then sort according to the channel share and see. We would get the following result:
In the table above, we can see that most of the channels now are HD channels but the total coverage of the channels is still very low. We can keep on increasing and decreasing this score to get a good mix of channels. For example, we would now change the affinity score filter to include a score of 1.2 and above and see the result.
In the table above, we can see that most of the channels now are news channels and cover about 6% of the TG. We can keep on exercising this to get an optimum mix of channels for advertising.
#3: Considering CPRP for selecting channels
Another major factor that can help you decide which channel to choose is CPRP. CPRP stands for Cost Per Rating Point. It is the amount spent by an advertiser to achieve a TVR of 1 (Refer to our article#2 in the series to understand TVR). CPRP helps brands decide whether it is cost-efficient to advertise on the selected channels or not. We would check the cost efficiency of the top channels selected in the previous section.
In the table above, we can see that in terms of CPRP, Star Utsav, Sun TV and Star Maa and Star Plus work the best for the brand.
Pros:
Cost-effective
Cons:
Focusing on cost only can lead to compromise on quality
As we saw in the last few tables, going by any one approach may not end up in a balanced result hence, the best practice often is to use a combined approach. For example, the table below takes into consideration all the above factors:
In the table above, we can see the top channels in terms of share as well as their affinity and CPRP listed down too. The cells in green have values that are above average. We can see that Sun TV, Star Plus and Sony SAB are the best performing channels based on all the parameters.
Time Band Report & Program Report: Fine-tuning your TV plan
We know that viewership for any channel doesn’t remain the same throughout the day and across the programs. Many brands are particular about the time band and programs where they would like to place their ads.
Time band Report
From an advertising point of view, the entire day is mostly divided into prime time band and non-prime time band. Prime Time bands are particular hours in a day when the viewership is higher than the rest of the day. The prime time bands mostly coincide with the non-office hours. Usually, on weekdays, for most channels, prime time is from 6 pm to 12 am except for news and music channels for which 7 am to 10 am is also prime time band. For weekends, the prime time band covers the entire day from 6 am to 12 am.
A time band report basically breaks a day into multiple parts (upto 30-min each) and reports the viewership data for a particular channel and period. Time band reports can help us deep dive and decide how the viewership of a channel changes throughout the day and the impact it has on the ad rates and ad reach. Following is the graphical representation of a time band report for Star Plus, Sony SAB and Sun TV. During the time bands 1600-1800, 2200-2300 and 2430-2600, Star Plus has a high channel share among the target audience. For Sun TV, viewership share during early morning hours is very high. Similarly, we can use time band reports to finetune TV ad plans.
Program Report
Similar to the time band report, program report has program-wise viewership data for particular program, channels or time bands during particular time period. Here’s a graphical representation of viewership share of various programs on Star Plus.
In the last two articles, we discussed about various reports that can be obtained by BARC like competitor analysis report, channel share report, time band report and program report. We discussed through examples, how we can use these reports to plan TV campaigns that are accurate and effective. In the next article, we would learn more about making a TV advertising plan.
In case you have a question related to television advertising or television advertising planning, let us know at Help@TheMediaAnt.com.
