Fake Facts
The media research world has long been awash with exaggerated claims and headlines. It is often how advertising space is sold. Specialist media buyers and their research advisors exist precisely to sort the wheat out from the chaff. Some of the claims have been transformed into ‘facts’ through continual repetition; others, happily, have been modified as the truth has emerged.
Good examples of the latter have included widely circulated viewing figures for major sporting and other events. On June 26th 2005, The Sunday Mirror, a UK tabloid newspaper, reported that 5.5 billion people were due to tune into the Live8 concert being broadcast around the world the following week. It was just a forecast. But given only 1.7 billion households around the world even possessed TV sets at the time it was a heroic one.
Other sources after the event had other ideas: The Hollywood Reporter reported Bob Geldof’s estimate of 3 billion viewers; the BBC suggested a figure of 2 billion, while other sources confirmed the 5 billion viewer figure. Nobody really knew, so they just made it up.
The Olympic Games has long enjoyed stratospheric viewer claims, usually in the billions. But the IOC last year admitted that the estimated 3.6 billion people watching the 2016 event in Rio was a count of those in households tuning in for at least one minute of the sixteen-day event on television.
This seems more reasonable, although a limitation even of these official measurement statistics is that people are reported as ‘watching’ merely by virtue of being in a room with a TV set tuned to the programme in question. Official audience data is available in around 85 countries which comprise about three-quarters of the world’s population.
By quoting these figures rather than just picking a large number from the air, progress has certainly been made (and the viewing numbers are probably an under-estimate given all the unrecorded views on digital devices and in non-measured territories).
But there are other ‘facts’ which continue to be quoted where the truth is almost impossible to verify. A well-known example is the statistic that the ‘average person’ is exposed to around 5,000 advertising messages every day. There have been variations around this number, with estimates falling anywhere between a few hundred and more than 10,000.
In 2014, Media Dynamics, Inc. in the USA attempted to quantify exposure to advertising in the main media (TV, radio, internet, newspapers and magazines). They came up with an estimate of 362 ads daily, of which they thought maybe half were noticed and half again recalled at any level.
The study omitted Out of Home media, which account for a large chunk of ‘exposures’ to advertising, especially for those living or working in cities. Research by Route in the UK found that the average person passed by 71 poster frames every day (more than 150 for those living in the largest cities).
But even this doesn’t account for the large number of brand logos viewable by anybody walking past a shop or vehicle featuring a brand name. Are these advertising exposures?
The key point is that nobody knows how many messages people are ‘exposed’ to. It is almost certainly not 5,000. Nobody could accurately count the number of messages they saw in a day, although technology exists for them to be equipped with body or head cameras that track everything in front of them, which would allow anybody interested to count the brand logos or ad messages in view over the course of a day. And even if it did add up to 5,000, would this be useful information?
The growth in digital media has opened the floodgates for exaggerated claims about more precise targeting, more accurate ROI measurement and ‘relevant’ ads. But we have learned that while ads can be sent to users in particular locations, focused around sites and topics that interest them and re-targeted to them as they move around the net, there are negatives as well.
Studies suggest that only half of banner ads are physically ‘viewable’ (at least half of the ad in the viewable part of the screen for a second) and only 9% of ads served are actually looked at for more than a second. Digital ad fraud is a major issue (where the ‘audience’ is not a real audience), as is the fact that as much as half the population in many countries is unreached by digital ads either because they do not have access to broadband at home or because they have installed ad blockers.
The Next Big Thing in television advertising may be ‘addressable’ advertising. In some countries, a significant proportion of households (50 million in the USA, for example) can be targeted individually by virtue of them connecting to their broadcast signal via advanced set top boxes.
Because the address of the household is known, it can be cross-referenced with other address-based data (such as presence of children, car ownership, ethnicity and income). Advertisers can then target these households with ads that are relevant to them, without bombarding households for whom the advertising is not relevant.
It is a nice idea, but the claim depends on many things: first, inventory has to be made available by the broadcasters for addressable advertising. Then, critically, the key decision-maker(s) in a household should be watching the connected set when the advertising airs. There are many circumstances in which they might not be. Some TV sets may not be connected to the box. Individuals could be watching different programmes on different sets. The fact that a TV set is switched on and tuned to a given channel (which is all we know) does not guarantee that anybody is watching or, if they are, who they are.
In other words, addressable advertising can be useful and potentially impactful, but only if a lot of conditions are fulfilled. Let’s continue to be guarded against exaggerated claims and hype.
