Simultaneous Media Consumption (SIMM)
Berens: Let's talk about SIMM for a second.
Schultz: Okay.
Berens: I first heard about SIMM from your mouth, back in Deer Valley, in September of 2004. Since then, we have been very fortunate to work with Joe Pilotta and the people at BIGresearch, and they have been doing a lot for us. But, if you can give us the Don Schultz definition of, not only of what SIMM is, but also, why it is important for marketers to be looking at it, I would be grateful.
Schultz: Well, let's go back, because it is fairly simple. If I am online, I have got the TV set on, flipping through a magazine, talking on the cell phone, all at the same time -- what audience am I in?
Berens: All of them.
Schultz: Well, now how do I count you?
Berens: Precisely.
Schultz: Do I count you as 25 percent, because you are doing four things at once? Or, do I count you as 100 percent, which is what we do now, and I end up with 400 percent usage? And, that is why the systems don't work, because the systems just totally ignore any kind of simultaneous exposure. They ignore any kind of parallel processing. We go out and measure television, then we go out and measure newspaper, and then we go out and measure magazine… We have no clue as to what the synergy is -- whether those work together; whether they work separately; whether they work independently. Why they help each other; where they hurt each other. We don't know. We make the assumption they are additive, but they are not.
Berens: That is the "glass is half empty" perspective on it. But, I think there is a "glass is half full" opportunity for really smart marketers, who are the people who will actually be able to leverage the different channels against each other at the same time.
Schultz: Well, I think that is absolutely true. But, the problem is… I have been doing some work on synergy with Prasad Naik out at University of California Davis, and one of the things we find in the synergy thing is that when you put two or three media forms together, in some cases they are not additive, they are multiplicative. So, you get 1 + 1 + 1 isn't three. Instead, 1 + 1 + 1 is around nine.
In some cases, they are simply additive. Then, in other cases when you put combinations together you actually depress your response rate. No one has done very much work on synergy and combinations of media, and everything we have done, even when it has been done, has been only two media at a time.
Just two -- a comparison of this versus that: television and radio, or radio and direct mail. We have never looked at the milieu out there of all the things that people are doing, and how do all those things work together? Nobody has even started to talk about that, yet.
Berens: And, the over-valuation of the media buying is something that I think no one really wants to pay a lot of attention to right now, because it is going to kill the bottom line.
Schultz: Well, yes. The other problem is that most of the media buying organizations have spent so much money on optimizer models, and they don't want to see that go away. They think, "I just sunk another couple of million dollars in updating my optimizer, but I don't have an awful lot of the stuff in the optimizer. I don't have in-store in there. I don't have online. I don't have any iPod. I don't have any of that stuff in there. So, what good does my optimizer do me? And so, I don't want to hear about what you guys are doing. I want you to go away."
Berens: We have been watching the way that -- just over the past four to six weeks -- the television content distribution model has started to change.
Schultz: (Laughs.) Pretty dramatically, yeah.
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