By Laura Davis-Taylor, VP of Global Retail Strategy, Creative Realities, LLC
Laura Davis-Taylor will be a featured speaker at the Retail 3.0™ Virtual Conference on April 21, 2010.
As more retailers embrace the concept of marketing at retail, an interesting phenomenon I’ve recently witnessed is that of old school media planners struggling to include the store as a media. Invariably, the one place they get truly hung up is defining “reach” within the store.
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Lets start with some media definitions. Wikipedia defines the word reach when associated with advertising as “a measure of the size of an audience”. GRP (short for Gross Rating Point) is how the industry measures reach by a specific media vehicle or schedule. And, the CPM is how they represent the cost to reach 1,000 people within that specific media vehicle.
Almost all traditional media is defined and measured this way, so it’s no surprise that people new to playing within stores inquire about a retailer’s in-store GRP and CPM. There are, however, some big issues with this approach.
Many factors have wreaked havoc on the traditional marketing world, causing brands to look at new outlets, new vehicles and new methods for connecting with busy, distracted people on the go. Lucky for us, the store was reevaluated as a consumer connection point and folks like P&G helped the industry see that it’s actually the richest place to create a relevant dialogue with that consumer. Given that a message received in-store is an active one, meaning that shoppers can respond with a buy immediately, it’s actually shocking that this was such big news. Regardless, it has legitimized the store as a healthy piece of the yearly marketing plan.
Consider this other fact: Shelly Palmer, media guru and host of Digital Life, recently shared that 5 years ago there were approximately 25,000 broadcasters in the United States, consisting of about 18,000 radio stations, a couple thousand television stations, and a few thousand multi-systems operators (MSOs). Today, there are more than 150 million broadcasters. His point was that attention is what everyone in the advertising industry packages and sells, yet reach has no direct correlation to attention. Reach is just the potential — attention is the hopeful outcome.
Somehow, in our zeal to blast out messages to as many people as possible, we overlook that all businesses exist on sales. Reach has been used as a first step to hopefully get someone’s attention to move them to take the next step — purchase. Nowhere is this truer than within a store.
So, why are we devaluing store real estate with this antiquated model? The same reason we do many things — because it’s what we’re comfortable with. And, if we want Madison Avenue to transfer dollars away from newspaper, radio and TV into new genres of in-store marketing, they want to compare the store with other vehicles apples to apples.
Before we succumb, I challenge all of us in the industry to rethink this. I’ve often asked these CPM-insistent media buyers how they will be transacting TV media buys once we start reporting exact commercial viewership at the household level (the US went to digital TV this past June and it can already be done). Then, I ask their clients how they prefer to buy in-store media. In most cases, it’s somewhere in between flat sponsor rates, cost per qualified engagement and a revenue share. Notably, these big brands are always clear that they are willing to pay premiums based on the level of measurement the retailer is willing to share.
I worked in the advertising industry for most of my career, and I learned a very valuable lesson: a message that has no relevance to someone is an advertisement; a message of personal relevance is a communication. I therefore consider reach not a measurement of potential bodies exposed to an advertisement, but of confirmed human beings that noticed and absorbed a message.
The “store as a media” is a new concept being overlaid on a very established consumer channel. It indeed opens up a lucrative new revenue stream for retail brands. I simply ask that as we become savvier in the art of “relevant reach”, let’s try to keep our stores measured by this new school thinking rather than by dying media dogma.
Value and measure by message impact — it’s a much better path to happy shoppers, inspired vendor partners and thriving stores.
Laura is an 18-year Agency veteran with a diverse background in traditional advertising, brand planning, interactive marketing, digital signage, merchandising and retail/environmental design—all geared towards creating consumer-centric solutions for the business challenges of her clients. She is the newly appointed VP of Global Retail Strategy for Creative Realities, LLC, a full service experiential design and branding firm that specializes in creating meaningful, memorable, branded experiences. A well known in-store digital media expert, she chairs the POPAI Digital Signage Advocacy Committee, and is a board member of the Digital Signage Expo, the Digital Signage Federation and the Digital Content Circle. She co-authored her first book, “Lighting Up the Aisle: Practices and Principles of In-store Digital Media”, in 2007 (available at http://www.lightinguptheaisle.com).
Laura can be reached at [email protected].