Media for Power Players: Reaching the Business Elite Audience

The American business elite are voracious consumers of all media, including business and niche publications, television programming, and Internet content, yet they are highly selective of how they are engaged with different media and the realm of influence per medium.

While some advertisers are interested in helping them with their personal assets--investing or spending on luxury goods--many others revere this group's influence on business spending. In the IT, financial services, and business world, they are most coveted of all audiences: the illustrious C-suite executives (the chief officers of an organization), senior decision-makers, and the heads of key functional areas that authorize and influence corporate purchasing choices and contracts.

Ipsos Media's subscription-based U.S. Business Readership Survey (USBRS) of top-tier executives from business, industry, and commercial organizations identifies the clout of this discerning market: the survey's projected universe of nearly 630,000 C-suite executives are making $1.29 trillion U.S. in business purchase decisions for business services, IT, telecommunications, financial services, insurance services, automotive, and office and industrial equipment, plus 6.3 million business air trips and 11.4 million hotel nights for themselves and their companies.

There are hundreds of media outlets and thousands of advertisers competing for the attention of these power players: few can afford any sort of blanket coverage, and no one can afford to be wasteful. Helping narrow the scope for media buyers, the USBRS database reveals which executives have the greatest sphere of influence, which media the business elite chose first, and which channels are their main information sources.

Tuning in

With the appeal of frequency and timeliness, execs choose network TV as their main source for U.S. news (29% of the projected C-suite universe) and political news (21%), and cable TV for international news (28%) and sports (28%). They turn on the TV first for breaking news (22% watch network news, 35% prefer cable for breaking news), entertainment news (28% tune in to network TV), and sports news (cable TV is the main sports information source for 29%). The Internet dominates for up-to-the minute news from the financial markets, as the web was execs first choice for keeping informed at work (55%).

Media that's on Target

Customizable, targeted, and niche media found on the Internet are the primary venues for this high-income market to get personal financial information (30% of the projected C-suite universe) and for after-work help (34%). The tailor-made advertising on the Internet is effective too: respondents were most likely to have visited a website after seeing an advertisement on the Internet (46%) and to have purchased a product after seeing an advertisement on the Internet (51%). It's not all business either: the number one monthly measured publication among business elite surveyed was Golf Digest.

In-Depth Insights

The business elite turn to national newspapers first for deeper understanding of the issues that matter to them, particularly financial and business news (18% of the projected C-suite universe), as they trust newspapers to have the best journalists (28%) and reliable reporting (23%). The Wall Street Journal is their top pick of the dailies (46%).

For keeping abreast of technology, this group of decision-makers prefers business magazines (22%), such as weeklies BusinessWeek (20%), bi-monthly publications such as Fortune (18%) and Forbes (17%), and monthly publications like CFO (15%). Business magazines are also this group's primary resource for informative advertising (15%), general business help (32%), and information to manage their career development (29%).

The aforementioned results are only a fragment of the findings from the USBRS's robust database of annual syndicated media research--which includes readership reach, frequency, and value measurements for 52 titles, 10 channels, 85 programs, and 25 sites, questions on business travel and business activities, attitudes and ownership survey information--but they're a sample of what is provided to media planners to narrow the scope, enabling them to better target the desirable C-suite execs for their business-to-business clients.