Our media strategies editor discusses the need for predictive tools when it comes to interactive media planning.

One of the greatest challenges facing media planning today is the same challenge that has always faced it. Whether online or offline, the challenge has been how to predict the effectiveness of the media used. Determining the cumulative effectiveness of multiple media channels deployed for a total media plan remains the paramount task of media professionals. And the continuing emergence of media platforms only makes this task all the more important.

In the early days of media, what mattered was how much circulation a print vehicle had. Then it was how many people listened to a radio program. Then it was how many people watched a television program. Eventually, the number of people a media vehicle reached was seen as being inadequate. The discrete determination of what kinds of people made up the audience of a particular media channel and/or media vehicle reached became more important. Concerns with the efficiency of the media being used could only be addressed by figuring out how well that media reached the desired audience for the communication being delivered.

A raw count of audience isn't good enough for determining the efficiency and effectiveness of media because it can't distinguish between the right people and the wrong people. Media carrying a message to the wrong crowd could be perfectly effective when carrying that message to the right crowd.

The way media's effectiveness has ultimately been determined is through reach and frequency against a discrete audience, reach being the percentage of audience being touched by the messaging, and frequency being the number of times that message has on average reached that discrete audience.

But it was being able to predict reach and frequency for a media plan that became such an important feature in choosing one media plan over another. A predictive combined reach and frequency, which is the quantification of how many people in an audience is communicated with and the average number of times they are communicated with, accounting for all the different media channels used, became the deciding factor for calling out one media plan as better than another.

The online version...?
Online continues to resist this kind of quantification. Atlas DMT's GRP Forecaster was an attempt at providing this kind of data, giving media planners and their clients a quantifiable comfort level that the online media being used could be predicted to do its communication job. But it didn't allow for combining that data with an overall media plan (that had to be done by hand, which I know how to do, having started my career during the twilight of old-school media planning). The tool never caught on, largely because most online clients weren't asking for it. 

Now, before the industry has even addressed how to account for online's contribution to the overall communication delivery of a media plan, more media channels are going live and reaching audiences.

Predictive determination of a total media plan's cumulative effectiveness is so important because advertisers who continue to be cost-conscious will ultimately demand it. And media planning will be better for it. Everyone working in media -- online or offline -- wants to put together the best (read: most efficient and effective) media plans.

And finally, if online is ever going to really be able to legitimately throw off the yoke of being looked at through the lens of direct response due to its own unique feature of data generation, the predictive quantification of media effectiveness beyond the impulsive response is going to be the way.

Even while the industry is not able to provide this kind of information (and by industry, I mean all of advertising), it will inspire confidence and successfully draw clients into trying new media channels -- platforms for carrying content -- if it demonstrates that it is looking for a way to answer the question, "what kind of effect will my overall media plan have on the audience I am seeking to reach?"

With the portability of content unfettering audiences from time and place for media consumption -- be it mobile, iPod, PSP-like devices, online gaming and console gaming, place-based media, and any other kind of platform for carrying content we haven't even thought of yet -- we have to figure out how to demonstrate the communication value of messages carried on those platforms if those platforms are ever going to be more than emergent.

The preeminent proxy in place now continues to be reach and frequency. Engagement is another, though that remains largely undefined (and hasn't been heard from in some time). Looking at the time spent with each media, and the particular vehicles through that channel, and figuring out a creative way to account for the total estimated potential time exposed to messaging through all of those different channels is another way to predict cumulative media effectiveness.

But ultimately research is going to need to be done first on what has been done and what happened before models will take shape to determine what will happen when certain media is used in concert.

Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International, Inc. an Omnicom Company. Read full bio.