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These days, your customer is bombarded from every direction by media messages. Billboards, radio spots, television commercials, flyers in the mail, telemarketing calls, print ads in every newspaper or magazine, and that’s all before he or she logs on to the Internet, where a thousand more messages await.
Your message has to stand out in this sea of advertising. Where broadcast advertising is concerned, one way to accomplish this is to advertise with frequency. You can’t expect a response after just one message. To build a need or desire for your product, you need to reach your potential customer multiple times.
The Media Buying Academy’s online bi-weekly newsletter reports that studies over the years have shown that in broadcast advertising:
1) The first time someone sees or hears an advertising message, it goes in one ear and out the other. Even if they do hear it, people say to themselves, “So what?”
2) The second time people see or hear an advertising message in a week,
they say to themselves, “Oh yeah. I’ve seen or heard that before.” They
begin to recognize something familiar about the message.
3) The third time people hear or see that same advertising message in a week, they say to themselves, “Do I have a need or desire to buy that product or service?” From then, up to the tenth exposure of the same message in a single week, the viewer or listener continues to ask, “Do I have a need or desire to buy that product or service?”
4) During the tenth through fourteenth exposure in the same week, people are no longer asking, “Do I have a need or a desire to buy that product or service?” The advertising message has probably reached the point of diminishing return. The customer will not be taking any action and the ad dollars are essentially wasted.
5) Once people are subjected to the fifteenth exposure in a week, the message becomes an irritation. It can become so bothersome that the listener or viewer can develop a dislike for the product or service, and the advertiser can count on not getting them as a customer!
Department store pioneer John Wanamaker once said, “I know half of my advertising dollars are wasted. I just wish I knew which half!” With the amount of research now available to media buyers, today’s John Wanamakers have a much better chance of identifying the point at which their ad dollars are being wasted.
Frequency is rarely discussed in relation to television or radio advertising without discussing the factor of reach as well. Reach is a measure of the number of people you can come in contact with during a single exposure of your message.
Integrated marketing firms like MillerWhite, LLC, using Arbitron and Nielsen ratings, can help their clients achieve optimum reach and frequency, maximizing the effect of a media buy before the message reaches the point of diminishing return.
In many cases, positive results are more easily achieved when two or more media outlets are used. Adding billboards and print ads to your radio and television spots, for example, builds up frequency, but with less chance that the listener/viewer will become irritated.
Click here to go to a graph that shows how multiple media outlets can enhance combined reach and frequency.
