In my recent InFocus, one of the six media planning mistakes I highlight is online media planners' tendencies to put more focus on the CPM than on the quality of the media they are buying. I'd like to take this opportunity to dig a little deeper into this phenomenon and point out the pitfall inherent in the practice.
The many media planners who get unduly focused on the CPMs of their plans are not to blame. Clients increasingly feature downward cost pressure as their goal when buying media, even if the primary goal is to communicate a value proposition and capture market share.
But today's media planner and buyer -- most often the same person -- is not given the time nor incentive to focus his or her energy, instead, on creating a strategy that, when put into media plan form, will accomplish a client's business objectives. Planners and buyers are given the directive to buy media as efficiently as possible, the end.
It is certainly not wrong to want to get the best deal you feel you can get for the media you are purchasing. But an overemphasis on the CPM means overlooking other aspects of a buy that are at least as important as that buy being efficient -- the media's effectiveness, for one. This goes to the heart of efficiency and how the definition of efficiency isn't fully understood by the typical online media planner.
What is the likelihood of a particular placement moving the client close to realizing its objective? That's effectiveness. But the meaning of efficiency is not a definition dependent solely on cost. Efficiency is where cost and effectiveness intersect. Can I buy media that will yield me a new customer for a dollar per? Yes. But if I only get one customer, what sort of business can I build on that? And what is that customer worth? What if I get a new customer for $3 per, but I'm getting 100 new customers? The efficiency of the media yielding these results is determined by more than just the cost of the media.
But today's planner has neither the time nor inclination to consider factors other than the CPM on a proposal to judge that proposal's merit.
The CPM is an attractive determining factor for choosing one site over another because it is A) tangible and B) easy to justify as a rationale for selecting one site over another.
When I started in traditional media, way back in the old days of last century, every plan had to have rationale written up for a given media vehicle's selection. These days, a lot of plans are just spreadsheets filled with numbers. It's a lot easier to sort a selection of RFPs by their CPMs and choose the lowest ones than it is to reason with a cost-conscious client about the relative noumenal value of one site over another.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about an RFP scorecard I'd concocted to help me choose websites for a media plan in a timely manner without focusing too much on cost alone. It may not be for everyone, and, in fact, I encourage all media planners to bring their own color to bear, as it were. After all, media and marketing are human endeavors, and what distinguishes the success of one media plan from another is not its CPM, but rather the thought and creativity that went into the strategy and its realization.
To summarize the RFP scorecard, this scoring system is a 1-to-5 point system based on:
- Relevance: How closely do the placements on the proposal from the publisher align with my target, my product, and my objective?
- Creativity: Do the creative units being proposed allow my creative team enough canvas to message? Are they the units I've asked for?
- Price: Where does the package cost or CPM come in on average relative to all of the proposals I've received?
- Research: Does the available research support the choice of the site under consideration? Does the audience index high or low versus the target universe?
I was speaking with my counterpart here at ICON who runs the print group. She's finding the same kind of phenomenon in that medium: downward cost pressures leading to the oft-bemoaned commoditization of media. Look, if media planning was all about the CPM, we'd only be planning and buying out-of-home and skywriting. The cost-per-thousands are really low. But there's more to media than that. We all know it. Now we just have to practice it.
Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.
On Twitter? Follow Meskauskas at @mediadarwin. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
