Bringing Mobile into the Digital Media Planning Process

As Comscore has highlighted over the last year, and recently in our Global Mobile Report, the Multi-Platform Majority is here and is growing. That is to say, more than half of the population now goes online using multiple platforms (desktop, smartphone or tablet) over the course of a month. Clearly this has changed the way in which we live our media lives, so it’s not a wild assertion that it should also influence the ways in which media is planned, bought and sold.

But there is a problem…

Multi-Platform Planning Requires Audience De-Duplication Capabilities
Imagine you are planning a brand’s digital marketing activity. You’ve recognised the explosive growth of smartphone usage, so as well as building a traditional online plan, you’ve also prepared a mobile one, both of which focus on achieving maximum reach (and minimal overlap). Here they are in Venn diagram form, with each circle representing a media property’s audience.

The problem is that while these may be well-optimised plans in isolation, this siloed approach does not properly account for either the unduplicated number of people reached by a campaign, or how many impressions they might see in total across all devices. In reality, your campaign could look like the illustration below, with almost complete overlap between the desktop and smartphone audiences. This plan would potentially lead to an under-delivery of intended reach, an over-delivery on frequency, and many wasted impressions.

An integrated multi-platform planning approach could be better optimised to deliver reach more efficiently, and achieve almost double the reach of the previous example:

In reality, a plan is most likely to fall somewhere between the two examples, but clearly there is a need to understand at a person level – not device level -- how the audiences of entities across multiple platforms interact.

The implications here have enormous impact on both the media-buying and media-selling sides of the ecosystem. Being able to plan to audiences wherever they appear is valuable to advertisers and their agencies, but it also allows shrewd media owners to argue greater share (or even justify a place at all) in media plans, if they are better able to demonstrate the value offered by their combined media entities.

A Planning Tool for Today’s Multi-Platform Needs
In order to help media planners tackle this challenge, Comscore has introduced its Reach/Frequency Multi-Platform tool, available now in the UK as well as the US and Canada. The tool gives planners an unduplicated view of audience scale, ad frequency and costs associated with multi-platform campaigns in order to reduce waste and improve campaign performance across all devices.

This helps all parties allocate their budgets precisely by platform and entity, taking into account target audiences, impressions, their personally updated CPM rates and frequency caps to build the most effective campaign against their reach and frequency objectives.

To learn more about Comscore Reach/Frequency Multi-Platform, download product information or contact us to learn more.