Online Video GRPs (Internet GRPs)
Some folks on the online side readily dismiss GRPs as outdated and a poor measure of the value of digital media. That is a mistake. The big budgets are still allocated to television and will stay there for a long time to come. For consumer goods advertisers that have 90+% of their budgets in television, marketing mix models are based on GRPs and are an essential part of the planning and budgeting process.
If GRPs are not used to measure online in concert with other media, then online is quite likely relegated to either (a) an arbitrary budget that pales in comparison to television, or (b) a budget that has that grown in small increments over time by proving its efficacy, but is still small in relative terms.
For big-budget consumers goods advertisers, now is the perfect time for agencies and publishers to speak in terms of iGRPs (Internet GRPs) if they are not already doing so. In the past 18 months, professionally produced long-form video is pervasive enough for even the most skeptical American marketer to realize that they can watch their favorite shows on their laptops. Any marketer who still doesn't realize that is a lost cause anyway.
That simple understanding has been a huge bridge to acceptance of parity between TV and online video, starting with spots that would run during broadcast programming. Of course, we have plenty of reasons why the online spot is much more valuable but we can get into that later.
The next step is then understanding of various forms of online video advertising and assigning a value to each ad type (e.g. in-stream vs. in-banner vs. overay). What is the value of each of those ad types relative to each other? How do you quantify the impact? There are methods to approximate the answers to these questions but in the long run, for any specific marketer, the real answer is that it requires custom research and ongoing analysis in order to stay up-to-date. Online video's impact is going to be different for every audience.
Knowing all this, we bring it back to the framework of GRPs for planning media. Understand the target audience's likelihood to be exposed via online video vs. a television plan. What the XMOS studies of five to eight years ago showed was that audiences are overexposed on television and that exposure through digital media is highly complementary. Therefore, a redistribution of budget to more online (specifically online video after you answer the questions above) ought to provide a much more efficient way to achieve a marketer's reach goals.
Coming back to the comparison of online video ads compared to television ads, several publishers have conducted studies demonstrating the increased value of online video. Hulu, for example, using Nielsen IAG Research, has shown that the same spot is almost twice as effective. Granted, that depends on whether or not you accept Nielsen IAG's methodology (recall surveys served as contests) and the validity of its upper funnel metrics. In the UK, ITV isolated viewers in a lab environment, asking some participants to watch a program on television and others to watch the same program online, and testing recall. Not surprisingly, the online viewers demonstrated higher recall. This test scenario actually favors television in several ways - 1) by forcing a viewer to watch in a lab environment, the study participant is changing from a lean-back mode to a lean-forward mode. In the "wild," Nielsen commercial ratings are not providing census-type measurement of actual households watching. It's a measure of tune-in. There is bound to be a bigger drop-off between "television tune-in to actual watching" than "online tune-in to actual watching." In summary, though, there is a ratio of an online video impression to a television impression. For any given audience, media plan, and marketer that ratio will be different but it is still critica to figure it out.
All this is to say that if online media is to secure a larger portion of media budgets, it still requires a logical and convincing approach to Internet GRPs, answering all the questions that surround them.
If GRPs are not used to measure online in concert with other media, then online is quite likely relegated to either (a) an arbitrary budget that pales in comparison to television, or (b) a budget that has that grown in small increments over time by proving its efficacy, but is still small in relative terms.
For big-budget consumers goods advertisers, now is the perfect time for agencies and publishers to speak in terms of iGRPs (Internet GRPs) if they are not already doing so. In the past 18 months, professionally produced long-form video is pervasive enough for even the most skeptical American marketer to realize that they can watch their favorite shows on their laptops. Any marketer who still doesn't realize that is a lost cause anyway.
That simple understanding has been a huge bridge to acceptance of parity between TV and online video, starting with spots that would run during broadcast programming. Of course, we have plenty of reasons why the online spot is much more valuable but we can get into that later.
The next step is then understanding of various forms of online video advertising and assigning a value to each ad type (e.g. in-stream vs. in-banner vs. overay). What is the value of each of those ad types relative to each other? How do you quantify the impact? There are methods to approximate the answers to these questions but in the long run, for any specific marketer, the real answer is that it requires custom research and ongoing analysis in order to stay up-to-date. Online video's impact is going to be different for every audience.
Knowing all this, we bring it back to the framework of GRPs for planning media. Understand the target audience's likelihood to be exposed via online video vs. a television plan. What the XMOS studies of five to eight years ago showed was that audiences are overexposed on television and that exposure through digital media is highly complementary. Therefore, a redistribution of budget to more online (specifically online video after you answer the questions above) ought to provide a much more efficient way to achieve a marketer's reach goals.
Coming back to the comparison of online video ads compared to television ads, several publishers have conducted studies demonstrating the increased value of online video. Hulu, for example, using Nielsen IAG Research, has shown that the same spot is almost twice as effective. Granted, that depends on whether or not you accept Nielsen IAG's methodology (recall surveys served as contests) and the validity of its upper funnel metrics. In the UK, ITV isolated viewers in a lab environment, asking some participants to watch a program on television and others to watch the same program online, and testing recall. Not surprisingly, the online viewers demonstrated higher recall. This test scenario actually favors television in several ways - 1) by forcing a viewer to watch in a lab environment, the study participant is changing from a lean-back mode to a lean-forward mode. In the "wild," Nielsen commercial ratings are not providing census-type measurement of actual households watching. It's a measure of tune-in. There is bound to be a bigger drop-off between "television tune-in to actual watching" than "online tune-in to actual watching." In summary, though, there is a ratio of an online video impression to a television impression. For any given audience, media plan, and marketer that ratio will be different but it is still critica to figure it out.
All this is to say that if online media is to secure a larger portion of media budgets, it still requires a logical and convincing approach to Internet GRPs, answering all the questions that surround them.
Labels: grp igrp gross rating point television nielsen iag hulu xmos
posted by Jarvis at
11:12 PM
5 Comments:
Facebook comment (I import this blog into my FB profile):
Michael Rubiano at 12:56am June 29
Excellent points, Jarvis. Well said. When we were selling political ads @ Y!, the major buyers for the campaigns were all asking about GRPs for the very reasons you mentioned - TV was and is the first line of the budget in the ad buy, whereas online was mainly an afterthought. At the time, and with a bit of encouragement from very well-versed folks in both the political and online arenas (remember Mark McLaughlin?), we moved away from GRPs for online, because from our vantage point, they were not relevant. But with the realization that the ad ecosystem is still largely dominated by TV, it would behoove the online players to look more closely at developing true Internet GRPs.
Facebook comment:
Ingrid Noceda at 7:24am June 29
comScore gives Web GRPs, do you guys know about those? How reliable do you think they are?
Facebook comment:
Jarvis Mak at 9:16am June 29
The problem with comScore's GRPs are that they don't differentiate among different ad units. When you think about online, it's really a platform rather than a true medium.
So comScore doesn't differentiate among a button and a homepage takeover unit and a video ad unit. Further, comScore doesn't even differentiate (although I've heard that there are plans) to distinguish between video content and video ads.
Any reliable notion of Internet GRPs has to account for varying degrees of impact. Otherwise, any marketer is best just buying Yahoo! Mail or a simple ad network to obtain massive reach. Clearly, quality matters.
One way to factor in quality into Internet GRPs is by the measured impact in response (either behavioral or attitudinal). Another way to factor in quality is the perception of quality as represented by CPM.
Jon Gibs at 3:57pm June 29
Nice post Jarvis. Some things to think about...
-Size is probably not the only limiting factor in terms of impact. The other is the amount of time the image stays in front of a given consumer. Using a time based method allows you to use a length of view metric similar to the one that is used for TV.
-You also need to take into account page clutter. The more cluttered that page, the more information, the less impactful the advertising.
...and these go on. Clearly this is somthing I spend a lot of time working on. I think where I've come down to is this: on it is that TV counts a .15 and a .30 the same as a bumper They are all one exposure. The GRP is supposed to be a volume based metric (i.e. how many?) rather than any judge of the quality of the advertising itself. Therefore a button should be treated the same a rich media exposure.
I would also think about frequency. If I am running a pre-roll with a companion ad, is that a frequency of two or one? This gets fun.
Jarvis Mak at 5:36pm June 30
Jon - You're right that size is not the only limiting factor. You list several great relevant factors.
However, I disagree with the premise that GRP is solely a volume measure and the accompanying logic that a button should be treated the same as a rich media exposure (and therefore the same as an online video exposure).
The point of using GRPs for mix models is to associate response with stimuli. In an ideal world, modelers distinguish between TV :15s, :30s, and bumpers and also account for other key differences in other media ad formats. Even if you don't, clearly, the variation between an online button and an in-stream :30 video exposure are much greater.
I agree that "this gets fun" thinking about all the relevant factors... it should be the subject of a follow-up blog post.
By the way, the original post was imported from my blog at http://blog.jarvismak.com.
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