Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and Online GRPs (part 2)
Greetings from the Sports Marketing Conference in beautiful Chicago. I just sat down after my panel where we discussed, yes, you guessed it – online GRPs.
This seemed like an opportune time to pick up on my series discussing the ins and outs of online GRPs. In my last post, I outlined three core reasons why I dislike the concept of online GRPs. Those reasons are:
1. GRPs tell you very little about an actual campaign (Isn’t the net of reach and frequency just impressions?)
2. GRPs do not take into account the efficiencies brought about by Internet delivery (How do I measure waste and make it relevant across media? Targeted rating point, I think not!)
3. GRPs will not be comparable across media (What is the equivalent of a 6 minute qualifier online?)
In part 2 of this series I would like to pick up on the first point, GRPs tell you very little about a campaign, and in fact might be misleading.
GRPs, in their simplest form, are reach multiplied by frequency. So let’s take a hypothetical buy and see what would happen if we flighted it on 6 different sites: MySpace, Weather.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, CNN.com and NYTimes.com. Using May Netview data see what happens:
Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it tell us? Well, it tells us that MySpace has the most inventory right? But we knew that anyway…
Let’s look at this a different way:
What we’ve done here is kept the GRPs standard. If a buyer wants 10 GRPs there are multiple ways for that to be provided. However, we know that the optimal frequency (depending on who you talk to) is somewhere between 2 and 5 – which is the reason why advertisers like frequency caps. Given that, should we be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 7 the same way we should be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 4? Probably not. A typical response is, okay, I’ll just provide GRPs with a frequency cap. We’ll, if that’s the case, you’re basically just selling reach, not GRPs!
Let’s even take this one step further, let’s look at MTV.com streaming audience. They had about 1.6 million streamers in the month of May…
Wait a second, you mean if I buy 10 GRPs I am still buying the same number of impressions no matter what?
If this is the case, what do GRPs in fact tell us that we don’t already know…nothing.
