When I first started my career in advertising, I was working in traditional media at a media auditing firm. My first job was to post-buy Burger King's Spot TV schedules all across the country.
For those of you who know what that means, I can feel your collective cringe. For those of you who have no idea what that means, not to worry. It isn't ultimately relevant to this discussion. But one of the things I learned doing that job was the meaning of dayparts. Dayparts is the label given to the parcels of the day -- specific hours of the day -- that media planners and buyers use to find their audiences and allocate advertising.
Daytime is 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Early Fringe is 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Unless it's the evening news, then it is called Early News, which may run in those same hours. Access is the hour before Prime, which is 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.
There are more labels assigned to different times of day, but you get the picture.
When putting together a media plan, it is important to think about not only which environments might best suit a client's product or service message, but also when the most appropriate time might be to advertise that message.
In traditional media planning, one has to not only define the target audience but also figure out which medium the target is most likely to be using, which vehicles within that medium they are most likely to be engaging in -- a specific magazine, a certain television program, a favorite radio format -- and when they are using that particular medium.
A great creative message alone isn't going to do the trick for you. It really doesn't matter how great the creative is if the right people aren't there to see it, right?
It's been possible pretty much from the beginning of the ad server era in online advertising to purchase media according to dayparts. But few were doing so. About seven years ago, some online publishers started making a concerted effort to promote dayparting for media schedules. For example, Budweiser ran ads on Fridays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., on what was then CBS Marketwatch. In 2003, comScore and the OPA both released reports with data showing that there were indeed specific times of day that had more of certain audiences than other times of day. The hope within the publisher community was that larger premiums could be charged for them, and the pitch was that those impressions were more valuable because certain states of mind were more open to different kinds of messaging at specific times of day.
Now? I’m hard pressed to remember the last time a publisher talked to me about dayparts. Is it because the sell for them is too hard? Or is it that no one cares? Do dayparts matter?
If I'm selling packaged goods that are usually picked up by commuters on their way home, then maybe it makes sense to advertise in the hours preceding departure from work. If I'm Boston Chicken advertising ready-made meals to bring home, it probably makes sense to address audiences in that same time frame. But while dayparting in traditional media used to be driven more by which audiences were more receptive during certain times of day, in online, dayparting only makes sense when the product, not the consumer, has an affinity with the time of day.
Why is that? Because online is the medium where it really is the case that if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn't make a noise. The reason? If there is no one there to hear it, the tree never falls.
In every other medium, one pays for the potential for an ad to be seen. It's called OTS, or opportunity to see. In online, one pays for the actual impression, and that impression never happens unless someone is there to make it happen. On a site, the ads don't show if the people don't go. But when the people do go? Well, it really doesn't matter what time of day they are there, be it 8 p.m. or 3 a.m.
More often than not, if someone is there, they want to be there. And if the product being advertised has affinity with the content, and the person engaging that content is interested in that content, then the time of day that content and its accompanying ads are viewed doesn't really matter.
I've had some clients do time-of-day advertising for tune-in messaging, and some who have wanted to reach a working audience by targeting the times of day those people are on their computers at the office. But unless the product has an association with a time of day, your audiences simply don't care what the clock says -- only what's on the screen.
Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.
