The Stories We Tell (Part 3): Building a Media Strategy

Building a Media Strategy

Consumers have an ever-expanding variety of media choices for their information and entertainment. Do your target consumers prefer video, print, radio, or online media? If they watch TV, is it via traditional set-top box or over-the-top? Are they ad receptive? Is email an effective way to reach them? Whether at an agency or client-side, marketers who are charged with media strategy need robust and representative insights into their audiences’ media habits, in order to prioritize advertising spend.

A travel company came to us for just this reason. While the company was a top competitor in its category, upcoming product launches and revenue goals called for a new definition of their core target, which the marketing team suspected required expanded media investment. The team included knowledgeable planners across both traditional and digital media, and they knew they needed a holistic view of their new target’s media behaviors in order to understand whether or not to make media buys in channels that they’d never used before. They turned to MRI-Simmons because our nationally representative studies cover brands, attitudes, and behaviors across hundreds of categories - including travel and media. We drew on these data assets to:

• Create a core target and sub-target definitions based on combinations of travel behaviors and demographics from MRI-Simmons national studies. This provided our client with context around the size of their new audience and overlap with their more traditional audience.
• Profile their targets across over 30,000 data points having to do with ad receptivity and engagement across different media and devices, specific content, channel preferences in print and television, and cross-channel digital media behaviors with apps, websites, and streaming video.
• Develop a visual story and recommendations detailing out the types of media their core target favors, the specific content they engage with and would be open to seeing ads in, as well as whether their sub-targets differed in any meaningful ways. Furthermore, based on daypart media measures and activity-level hour-by-hour mobile insights, we could tell our client which times of day were likely to get the most eyes and ears among their audiences.

Armed with this data and insights, our client was well prepared to set sail with their marketing plans and make decisions on media buys that would build up demand for all of the new offerings on their horizon.