Advertising Fails When...

Advertising fails when people have 

1. no knowledge of the offer. The ad is easily ignored.
2. no interest in the offer. The offer is (A.) irrelevant or (B.) misunderstood.
3. no trust in the offer. The claims made in the ad are not credible.

These problems can be solved by

1. getting the attention of the people with words and phrases that are new, surprising and different.
2. offering the people what they want to buy (instead of trying to convince them to buy what you’d like to sell.)
3. supporting your claims with examples that agree with the experiences of your prospective customers.

Do you need help with your advertising?

Media Buying: Gross Rating Points

By Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads

The following information applies to radio advertising for products and services that have long purchase cycles (Heating and Air Conditioning, Jewelry, Cars, etc.) It is not meant to be instructive for products with short purchase cycles (food, entertainment, etc.) or for special events.

Bad radio ads fail because they say nothing of consequence to the listener.

Good radio ads fail because they are scheduled to reach too many people with too little repetition. Radio scheduling decisions guided by a consideration of Gross Rating Points are virtually guaranteed to reach too many people with too little repetition (frequency.)

The average radio ad needs to be heard by the same listener at least 3 times within 7 nights sleep, week after week after week. Don’t skip weeks. Sleep erases advertising.

The minimum number of consecutive weeks your 1-week schedule will need to air is a function of the Product Purchase Cycle of the product or service in question. The longer the purchase cycle, the longer the weekly radio schedule will need to air before it begins delivering maximum ROI (return on investment.) Results begin very slowly for products and services with long purchase cycles. Think of the early weeks as the “ramping up” period. Or, if you’d prefer to see it from the advertiser’s perspective, these early weeks are the “chickening out” period. 

The correct radio schedule is a 1-week schedule that achieves at least a 3-frequency with as much Net Reach as the advertiser can afford to sustain.

Net Reach is the number of different persons who will hear your ad a specified number of times. If you were to generate a report for a 6-week or 14-week schedule, the net reach would be the collective or “cumulative” number of different people reached over the 6 or 14 weeks in question. But since we are deeply concerned with the ratio of repetition to sleep, we must reject any report other than the 7-day “typical week” report. This same “typical week” must run week after week after week. REMEMBER: the same person needs to hear the same ad 3 times within 7 night’s sleep. Our computer-generated Reach and Frequency Analysis needs to show us a weekly “Net Reach” number with a frequency (repetition) of 3.0 or higher.

(The only way to reduce an ad’s need for repetition is to craft a message of such credible urgency that a significant number of listeners will take action even though they are not yet in the market for the product in question. But this is MUCH easier to plan than to do. Advertisers often convince themselves they have created a “compelling offer” when they have in fact created the “average ad” we referred to in paragraph three.)

The math that underlies the calculation of Gross Rating Points virtually guarantees your radio ads will reach too many people with too little repetition (frequency.)

Bill Bernbach famously asked, “Would you rather reach 100 percent of the people and convince them 10 percent of the way, or reach 10 percent of the people and convince them 100 percent of the way?”

He was speaking, of course, about Reach and Frequency.

Reach: the number of different people who encounter your message.

Frequency: The number of times they encounter it.

Reach x Frequency = Gross Impressions

When the number of Gross Impressions achieved by an ad campaign is equal to the population of the trade area in question, you have achieved 100 Gross Rating Points.

In other words, 100 Gross Rating Points is the mathematical equivalent of reaching 100 percent of the population of a trade area, 1 time each. 
Or 50 percent of the population twice. 
Or 25 percent of the population 4 times. 
Or 10 percent of the population 10 times. 
Or 1 percent of the population 100 times.

Each of these is 100 Gross Rating Points.

Q: But would each of these schedules produce the same results?

A: Of course not.

I’ll end with an example I witnessed only last week.

I was asked to evaluate a 14-week radio schedule in one of America’s largest cities for which the advertiser had committed to pay 150,000 dollars. I was informed that a highly qualified professional media buyer had negotiated the schedule at a very low cost per Gross Rating Point (GRP.)

Prior to looking at the schedule, I predicted it would reach far too many people with too little repetition. “It’s almost unavoidable,” I said, “when you’re hungry for Gross Rating Points.” 

“Don’t worry about your reach; worry about your weekly frequency,” I told them. Don’t let it fall below 3.0 per week. Don’t try to reach more people than you can afford to reach 3 times every week. Create an effective 1-week schedule and air it on the same station week after week after week. Don’t move it from station to station. Consistency is the frequency of the frequency, the repetition of the repetition. Let the Net Reach be whatever your budget can provide, but never settle for less than a 3.0 weekly frequency.”

The good news is that the $150,000 schedule - spread across 4 stations – was going to deliver a Net Reach equal to 72 percent of the total population of that city during the 14-weeks in question. And guess what? It delivered a 4.7 frequency!

Not a weekly 4.7 mind you, but a 4.7 frequency spread across the 14 weeks, collectively. In other words, the typical listener would hear the ad once every 20 days.

That schedule is virtually guaranteed to be ineffective.

The answer? Put all the money on one station and don’t settle for less than a 3.0 frequency each week. If the Net Reach drops from 72 percent of the population down to just 13 percent or less, that’s fine. The lifeblood of radio is frequency and consistency. Thirteen percent reach with a 3-frequency each week for 14 consecutive weeks means roughly 750,000 people in that city will have heard the message of that advertiser a few dozen times each. 

And believe it or not, the average commercial message requires that kind of repetition in today’s overcommunicated society.

Bill Bernbach was one of the great ones. 
More people should have listened to him.

Roy H. Williams

Google devastated the effectiveness of Yellow Pages advertising.

Television has been crippled by DVRs, Netflix and other streaming video sources. 

Newspapers in a digital age tell us what we’ve already known for 24 hours. 

Radio alone, of all the major media, has been able to retain most of what it once had. (Radio has lost only about 7 percent since the dawn of the digital age. CDs, iPods and satellite-delivered-radio each barked loudly at broadcast radio but their bite was very soft.) Pandora personalized online radio could possibly grow large enough to seriously challenge broadcast radio in the future and give advertisers a new way to reach the masses, but right now all we’re hearing is barking. This could change, but not overnight. 
I’m keeping an eye on it.
- Roy H. Williams, 

columnist for Radio Ink magazine,
author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling Wizard of Ads trilogy.
Date of this writing: January 27, 2012

Why Radio Doesn't Work

By Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads

Hear memo. 

My original plan was to make today’s memo the sequel to last week’s memo about media buying, but I decided not to go to the trouble.

You see, I’m convinced no one believes me.

I wrote last week’s memo to warn you of the extraordinary dangers of using Gross Rating Points as a guide to media placement.

“But Roy, that’s how everyone does it.”

“I know, and that’s why most advertising doesn’t work very well. Especially radio advertising.”

“But that’s how everyone does it.”

“Yes, I know. And that’s why so many businesspeople in America say, ‘I tried radio and it didn’t work.’”

“But that’s how everyone does it. Gross Rating Points are the industry standard.”

You see why I decided to drop the whole thing, don’t you?

I know you’re secretly relieved I’m not going to talk about media negotiation/buying/placement again. Most of you have your own beliefs about what would work and why it would work. 

Many years ago in a college classroom a person standing at the front of that room pronounced Gross Rating Points to be orthodox. That person had been given those beliefs to cherish and protect and pass along to the next generation when he or she was in college many years earlier.

Orthodoxy is a powerful thing. 

And that, you see, is why “everyone does it.”

Me? I’m just a goober who has spent a few hundred million dollars purchasing tens of thousands of radio schedules nationwide over the past 30 years and then watched to see what did and didn’t happen as the result of each and every schedule.

I paid attention. I even wrote a few New York Times bestselling books on the subject. But now I am boasting. I’m sorry.

Among the 50 thousand or so readers of the Monday Morning Memo, there may be two dozen of you who would like to hear me explain exactly what the problem is with a schedule negotiated according to Gross Rating Points and evaluated on a cost-per-point basis. So I’ve built a web page that summarizes the problem and explains how to avoid it. The two dozen of you that are interested can follow this link. The rest of us are going to talk about something different.

Bob Wakitsch is a cognoscenti graduate of Wizard Academy from the early years. He runs a dental lab. He was recently asked to write a feature story for the primary trade publication of his profession. (Did you know there are more than 140,000 dentists in America?) 

Bob chose to write about society’s pendulum and how it will likely affect trends in dentistry, which he is qualified to do since he dutifully absorbed the entire 2-day Pendulum class we hosted last fall. (We’re having another Pendulum class April 17 and rooms in Engelbrecht house are still available.)

Hi Roy,

Observation #1: I remember during your Pendulum presentation, you said something like, “Heroes in a ‘We,’ who are good, are either dead or fictional.”  The other day, while perusing in a bookstore, I noticed the titles in the bestseller sections.  In non-fiction, there was Killing Lincoln,  Steve Jobs, and Being George Washington. In fiction, there was 11/22/63, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Killer.

When I got home, I checked the bestseller lists from 1982 and 83, the zenith of the ‘Me.’  Obviously, it was loaded with ‘Me’ titles.  Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, Living, Loving and Learning (Buscaglia), Life Extension (Pearson and Shaw), In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman), Megatrends (Naisbet), Motherhood (Bombeck), The One Minute Manager (Blanchard and Johnson), Mary Kay’s Guide to Beauty andCreating Wealth (Allen).

You’re a genius.

Observation #2: The publisher of the trade journal in which my article about Pendulum will appear recently wrote that she was abhorred by the moral fiber of today’s society. She feels it seems to be split between those who are (1.) working together for the common good, and (2.) those who are greedy and trying to take advantage.  She even referenced Gordon Gecko (a prime example of a ‘Me’).  Finally, she said she wished Malcolm Gladwell would research all this and write a book so we could all understand it.  I wrote to her and told her she didn’t need to wait for a book from Gladwell because the DEFINITIVE work had already been written by Roy H. Williams and Michael Drew and would be out in April.  She is going to try and arrange her schedule so she can be in Austin in April for your next Pendulum workshop.  I hope so.

It’s funny - just like with third gravitating bodies, once you know about ‘Me’ and ‘We,’ you see it everywhere.

Thanks,

Bob Wakitsch

Right now you’re probably thinking I included Bob’s email in today’s Memo because I’m trying to build anticipation for the release of the Pendulumbook. That assumption seems reasonable, I’ll agree, but the truth is that I was feeling blue because so very few people will heed my warning about Gross Rating Points. I printed Bob’s email because it made me feel better when I opened it Friday morning. Yes, I am that small and vain and insecure.

Did you ever read The Catcher in the Rye? The title of that book refers to the recurring dream of Holden Caulfield, in which he is standing in a field of rye near the edge of a tall cliff. Children are playing in the field, unaware that death waits nearby.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

- Holden Caulfield in Chapter 22 of The Catcher in the Rye

Today is the last time I’m ever going to talk about media scheduling in the Monday Morning Memo. I hope you’ll understand and forgive me when I refuse to look toward the edge of that cliff or comment on the broken bodies below.

So when a businessperson cries, “Why? Why? Why didn’t it work?” and they want someone to explain it all to them, I’m just going to shrug my shoulders and suggest they call their college marketing professor or the salesperson who scheduled their ads or the media buyer who negotiated that schedule using a Gross Ratings Point target and a cost-per-point budget as the basis for their decision making.

I promise to make next week’s memo more fun.

Roy H. Williams

PS - After working with the late Woody Justice for a delightful 25 years, Roy H. Williams Marketing regretfully resigned that account shortly after Christmas. I share this with you only so you’ll know that we are no longer associated with Justice Jewelers in Springfield, Missouri. We do, however, wish them the best.

Two Kinds of Quality

By Jeff Sexton, Wizard of Ads Partner

I recently came across this fas­ci­nat­ing post about Apple Mar­ket­ing prin­ci­ples, as artic­u­lated by Apple circa 1977.  Here they are:

Now, as a mar­keter, the Empa­thy and Focus parts are sec­ond nature — at least in terms of under­stand­ing.

Putting them into prac­tice every day is harder stuff, but any copy­writer that doesn’t under­stand the impor­tance of empathiz­ing with the prospec­tive cus­tomer and focus­ing in on their pri­mary buy­ing moti­va­tions and con­cerns isn’t a copy­writer at all.

It’s the last ele­ment most mar­keters and copy­writ­ers screw up or over­look: the impor­tance of Imputed Qual­ity.  Not nuts and bolts, specification-driven build qual­ity or value for the dol­lar qual­ity.  But qual­ity cues that tap into buy­ers’ pre-existing men­tal imprint of lux­ury and vir­tu­ous man­u­fac­ture.  The telling detail that says everything.

Want to see an exam­ple of imputed qual­ity used in copy?  Here ya go:

Click to read more…

Fire Fast, Hire Slow

By Dave Young, Wizard of Ads Partner

This is age old advice in management circles.

Kinda funny how hard it is to do in practice. And it’s one of those topics where you look at business owners and managers and you think, “They really should take this advice.” I really want to talk about the “fire fast” but I’ll just touch briefly on the hire slow, because there are loads and loads of resources on how to hire people. Just remember that the worst thing you can do is hire the first person through the door that you think could probably learn to do the job. 

The biggest pressure point on hiring somebody too fast is that often it’s the owner or manager that’s having to pick up the slack for not having someone there in the first place. So their goal is, “I need to get somebody in here so I don’t have to work as hard.” And yet, if you hire the first warm body that comes in the door, you can actually create bigger problems. Just Google “hire slow” and find some ways to hire better and hire more slowly and more deliberately. You’ll do a much better job of getting the right people in and you won’t have to fire as fast because you’ll have hired better.

The firing fast it’s really something that, if you’re not doing it, could really be a killer in your business. It can really damage things. Not only the way the customer perceives your business but the employees that work with them.

Just look at the different points of view.

Click to read more…

Don't Be Afraid When Your Ad Produces Complaints

No committee will ever approve a great ad, they’ll castrate it. But in their minds they’re merely “tweaking it, softening it, taking off the offensive edge.”

Subject a talented ad writer to a lot of second-guessing and he or she will reward you with ads that all your friends and family are guaranteed to like.

Congratulations.

Now you’ve got ads that sound exactly like everyone else’s.

- Roy H. Williams

When it Comes to Business Growth and Marketing Strategy...

I don’t believe the customer is always right.

Sometimes, the customer is uniquely unqualified to assess what’s best for them.

Where Empathy Comes In

That said, an expert at empathy understands the delicate bridge connecting what the customer wants and what the customer needs.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, then use the benefit of your expertise to simply show them what they’d really prefer to do if they had your knowledge and skill set.

- Tim Miles, Wizard of Ads Partner

From the article, The 7 Facets of Kindness: Shareworthy Service.

Who Is Your Customer?

Media Buying Lesson Number One

By Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads

Hear memo.

I’ve never seen a business fail because they were reaching the wrong customer. But I’ve seen hundreds fail because they were saying the wrong things.

Most ads answer questions no one was asking.

How did we Americans become so fixated on “targeting the right customer” in our advertising?

That question has two answers. The first is, “because it’s completely logical” and our natural inclination is to follow the footsteps of lovely Logic, even when she leads us to erroneous conclusions. 

The second reason we’re fixated on targeting the right customer is, in two words, “advertising salespeople.”

If you were selling a commodity that was only mildly different than the same commodity sold by your competitors, you’d focus your sales presentation on those mild differences, right? Because if you didn’t, price would be the only remaining factor for your customer to consider.

I’m not accusing the ad-selling community of deception. I know these people and I like them. A lot. Many have been good friends for years. But like all sellers of products, they cannot be successful unless they convince themselves that buying advertising from anyone else would be a tragic mistake. And they care too much about you to let you make that mistake.

Advertising salespeople rarely succeed unless they 
(1.) sincerely care about their clients and 
(2.) believe they are telling their clients the truth.

But mass media – in all its forms – is a commodity. We call it “mass media” because it reaches the male and female, young and old, rich and poor, white-collar and blue-collar masses.

“Who is your primary target?”

“Females 25 to 34 years old.”

“Excellent! Barbie 98 is the Number One radio station for females 25 to 34! That’s exactly who we reach! If you don’t buy our station, you’re going to be missing the Barbies. We fit your needs like a hand in glove.”

“The Wizard of Ads told me to buy Wacko 103.”

“Well, I like the Wizard of Ads and I read all his books, but this time he’s wrong. Wacko 103 ranks number 7 with females 25-34 and they cost 20 percent more per ad than Barbie! That just doesn’t make any sense at all. Oh my god! Look at this data. Just 7 percent of Wacko’s audience are 25 to 34 year-old females while 17 percent of Barbie’s audience is exactly your target. Wacko 103 is just a tragically, horribly inefficient buy for you. The Wizard really missed it this time.”

Before we look deeper into this Barbie/Wacko fiasco, let me ask you a different question: Do the people outside your target have value? Is there anyone whose opinion you DON’T care about? Is there anyone you would rather NOT recommend you to their friends?

Decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. Each of us is guided by co-workers and family members, neighbors and friends.

If you are normal and healthy, you maintain about 250 people in your “realm of association.” Some of these are permanent members of that realm while others will pass through your life and be replaced. But the number hovers at about 250. And guess what? Beyond their connection to you, these 250 people have little, if anything, in common. They are your personal world: the male and female, young and old, rich and poor, white-collar and blue-collar “masses” that give your life purpose and meaning.

You are someone’s target customer. If I fail to reach you with my ads but my company is beloved by half the people in your realm of association, what’s the likelihood that you’ll hear about me?

Google and Facebook, radio and television, magazines and mailers, billboards and flyers are called mass media because they reach the masses. The ability to “target” using mass media is more illusion than fact.

Now let’s get back to glorious Barbie 98 and that tragic mistake, Wacko 103. (This example, by the way, is not extreme in any way. My media analysts see this scenario several times a day.)

The plain facts are these:
17,000 of Barbie’s 100,000 listeners are females 25-34.
14,000 of Wacko’s 200,000 listeners are females 25-34.

Do the math and you’ll see the advertising salesperson was telling the truth. But while Barbie gives you an additional 83,000 people outside your imaginary “target,” Wacko 103 delivers an astounding 186,000 additional people.

If we calculate Gross Rating Points for the 25-34 female “target,” Wacko appears to be 46 percent more expensive than Barbie on a cost-per-point basis. But if we consider that we’re paying for the entire audience of each station and step back to look at the question from this strange, new perspective, it becomes obvious that Wacko 103 offers twice as many people for just 20 percent more money. This means that Barbie, in truth, costs nearly twice as much as Wacko.

To be fair, there are other factors to consider: Average Quarter Hour persons (AQH) and Time Spent Listening (TSL) will dictate how many ads will be needed on each station to insure the average listener will encounter your ad with sufficient repetition each week, but these calculations are easily made.

Unless, of course, you accidentally multiplied Reach times Frequency to calculate Gross Impressions, the first required step in calculating Gross Rating Points (GRPs.)

Oh? You did that? You calculated Gross Rating Points? Well then you’re screwed. Sorry. Have a nice life with Barbie.

And tell her to eat a little, okay? No one should be that thin.

Roy H. Williams

PS – My Wizard of Ads partners receive salary increases from the clients they consult based on the growth of those clients. Dave Young and Michele Miller – who both teach at Wizard Academy – consult a jewelry store that posted 28 percent growth for 2011. This means Dave and Michele will get a 28 percent raise in their monthly paycheck. Well done, guys! By the way, when that store retained Dave and Michele 6 years ago, it was doing just 1.5 million in sales.They finished 2011 at more than 10 million dollars. So no, this is not the first raise they’ve earned from that client.

NEW SUBJECT: Due to the obvious success of clients we consult throughout North America and Australia, the Radio Advertising Bureau has asked me to do the keynote speech at their convention on March 7. I’m going to give them several examples of what’s working and why from the first 30 minutes of the Business Owners Workshop, “Advertising in 2012,” that will have been held two days prior (March 5) in Tuscan Hall across the parking lot from my office in Austin. You’re coming, aren’t you? (details here.) Jackie can take your $500 by phone at 512-295-5700. Get a good night’s sleep before you come.

Irrelevant Information

“We are in danger of valuing most highly those things we can measure most accurately, which means we are often precisely wrong rather than approximately right.”- Sir John Hegarty

Share of Mind

“Before you can have a share of mar­ket, you must have a share of mind.” - Leo Burnett