2. Introduction
• Much of when and where campaigns, issue advocacy efforts, and non-profits place their
TV ads is based on a combination of rudimentary data (Nielsen), and experience (found
both in campaign staff and media buyers). Let’s be very clear, there is a lot of value that
has been produced over the years by leaning on these resources.
• That being said, after having worked with several campaigns on maximizing the impact
of their TV buys, we have found several “rules of thumb” aren’t quite as “full proof” as
you might think. In fact we have consistently found (across numerous geographies and
race types) certain rules of thumb may be incorrect, over-generalized, or conditionally
valid.
• While we can’t share our clients data or findings with you, we have taken the time to
reproduce some of the key insights in a market where we did not have a paying client
(Houston, TX). Rest assured, the cases we present in this deck serve as good examples of
our experience across multiple markets, race types, and channels.
3. Executivesummary
This analysis concentrates on three “Rules of Thumb” we frequently hear, and if they should hold sway
• Rule of thumb #1: To achieve penetration with TV ads, it is smart to buy primetime, because A.) primetime ads talk to a
lot of people so they are worth a high cost B.)particularly desirable and elusive segments of the electorate we would want
to target watch prime time, and C.) these ads hit the “large” group of voters that watch only primetime.
- Using analysis of data , we find:
A lot of prime-time is inefficient as a vehicle for delivering impressions relative to time other times of the day
The desirable segments of the electorate we want to talk to aren’t elusive, and primetime has no inherent advantage in reaching these segments
The number of people who watch only prime time is not “large”, its actually very very small
• Rule of thumb #2: Broadcast news (e.g. local news or NBC nightly news) is not only a great place to reach lots of viewers,
you are also getting high concentrations of voters that we want to talk to on these programs.
- Using analysis of data, we find:
Some news is very efficient at talking to desirable segments of voters (and should be bought), some news is not (and should not be bought)
• Rule of thumb #3: Buy football as a rule. It’s got tons of live viewers, and a very high proportion of them are live-viewers
who will actually see the ads (unlike a lot of other programming).
-Using analysis of data, we find:
We agree football does have big audiences and that the majority are live-viewers. That being said, the decision on whether an ad during football is
worth buying demands a lot more nuanced analysis dependent on some key information, like what price do we have to pay? When in the football game
will the ad air? Does the game we are going to buy follow another with the market’s home team playing in it?
5. Isprime timeworthit?
Context
• Targeted-race campaigns currently spend the majority of their money on TV ad buys
• According to one popular Rule-Of-Thumb, to achieve penetration with TV ads, it is
smart to buy prime time. The reasons given traditionally are:
- There are a lot of people who watch primetime, so its worth paying high prices for it
- Key elusive parts of the electorate that you want to target watch prime time
- Primetime is the only time to buy the “large” group of voters who watch only primetime
• The only problem with just going along with this Rule-Of-Thumb is that primetime is
very expensive; a campaign can easily blow through the majority of its TV budget
buying a few primetime spots a week
• In the slides that follow, we examine reasons that are traditionally given to buy prime
time, and analyze the data to discover if they should hold weight
6. Prime timeis averyexpensivetimetobuyads
• Consider the graph on the left: it is showing you
the price your would pay on a Wednesday in
October to buy an ad on NBC in Houston (Q4,
2014), by time of day from 5 in the morning to
midnight. We have highlighted primetime in
yellow.
• As you can see, the price to buy time on NBC is in
the $200-$1000 range (for each 30 second spot)
for most of the day, until is shoots up in price for
afternoon news, and then for prime time.
• Note that prime time is costing a ton of money --
$4000 per TV spot as at its peak.
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QCost to
buy Ad
7. Investigating Claim #1: buying primetime is justified, because A lot of people
watch primetime, so that makes it “worth it”
• “Worth it” is a value statement. An ad is
“worth it” if it delivers enough value to justify
the cost. But what does “value” mean in our
context?
• Campaigns are buying TV ads to persuade
voters, so we care about getting our ad in front
of voters so they can be persuaded
• To help us understand if an ad placement does
this, we have now inserted a new line on the
graph, in red. This line represents confirmed
viewers on the channel
- What does “confirmed” mean? We have observed a
set of 37k Houstonians and what their cable set-top-
boxes are actually tuned to (literally, we can see
what these boxes are tuned to every second of
every day)
• So what do we make of buying at 11:30AM vs.
8:00PM?
WEds,NBC, Houston, 4Q
Note: Viewership figures above based on a second-by-second observed data set of 37,730 Houston set-top boxes
Viewers on
channel
Cost to
buy Ad
8. Investigating Claim #1: buying primetime is justified, because A lot of people
watch primetime, so that makes it “worth it”
• We realize that if we buy at 11:30 AM, we are
going to pay $200, and we are going to get 32k
viewers to see that ad. This means we are
paying six tenths of a cent for each impression
we achieve at 11:30AM
• If however, we buy at 8:00PM, we realize that
we are getting 32k viewers, but we are paying
for $3500 for it. This means we are paying
almost 11 cents an impression for each viewer
who sees our ad.
• This means we are paying 18 times more per
impression at 8:00PM than we are at 11:30AM
• Would you pay 18 times the price for a piece of
persuasion mail if the mail man delivered it to
the box at 8:00PM instead of 11:30AM?
Probably not.
Note: Viewership figures above based on a second-by-second observed data set of 37,730 Houston set-top boxes
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4Q Viewers on
channel
Cost to
buy Ad
9. Investigating Claim #1: buying primetime is justified, because A lot of people
watch primetime, so that makes it “worth it”
• What we are getting at here is efficiency -- it turns
out, you can buy TV much more efficiently on some
shows that others.
• We like to think of efficiency in terms of cost-per-
impression (CPI). In the case of this example:
- 8PM buy: $3500 cost / 32,000 viewers = 10.9 cents
- 11:30AM buy: $200 cost / 32,000 viewers = 0.6 cents
• So we can say the CPI for buying at 8PM is 10.9
cents, and the CPI for buying at 11:30AM is 0.6
cents.
• But what about all the other times we could have
bought during the day? Would those times have
been efficient? How much would we pay per
impression then?
Note: Viewership figures above based on a second-by-second observed data set of 37,730 Houston set-top boxes
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4Q Viewers on
channel
Cost to
buy Ad
10. Investigating Claim #1: buying primetime is justified, because A lot of people
watch primetime, so that makes it “worth it”
• By simply dividing the price we would have to
pay for each half-hour segment by the
number of viewers for each half hour
segment, we can quickly get to cost-per-
impression for all timeslots throughout the
day.
• Looking at this, we realize prime time is one
of the worst times we could have bought this
channel, in terms of efficiency.
• Why care about efficiency? If you are able to
buy impressions at one quarter the cost of
what you would have otherwise bought at,
you can make the same money go four times
further. That means you can buy four times
the ads against your targets. That means you
can show them more messages, or the same
messages more often, for the same amount
of money!
Note: Viewership figures above based on a second-by-second observed data set of 37,730 Houston set-top boxes
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QCost per
impression
11. Investigating Claim #1: buying primetime is justified, because A lot of people
watch primetime, so that makes it “worth it”
• What this all means: lots of primetime is not
“worth it”. We could take the same $4k we
might spend on a prime time ad and put it
behind lots of other buys that would yield
lots more impressions on the voters we are
trying to persuade
Note: Viewership figures above based on a second-by-second observed data set of 37,730 Houston set-top boxes
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QCost per
impression
12. Investigating Claim #2: buying primetime is justified, because lots of
desirable and elusive segments of voters watch it
• To determine the validity of this second justification for
buying primetime, we need to look at several types of
voters we might want to target with ads (desirable
segments), and determine if we could find them elsewhere
(are they really elusive?)
• Let’s say we’re running a Republican primary race. One
obvious desirable target would be Republican Primary
Voters. Because we are observing individuals (37 thousand
of them in Houston in this case), we can pick out only those
that are Republican Primary Voters, and plot their
viewership on the left in green.
• Or, what if we are running a targeted Republican vs.
Democrat general election race? Well a desirable group to
talk to would those who are not hard partisans. We could
define that group as those voters we don’t see registered to
a major party and or taken part in a primary where they
pull a Republican or Democrat ballot. We plot their
viewership in blue.
• Even at first glance, the claim is starting to look dubious.
These desirable segments don’t seem that elusive.
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QViewers on
channel
13. Investigating Claim #2: buying primetime is justified, because lots of
desirable and elusive segments of voters watch it
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QCost per
impression
• We can calculate the cost-per-impressions for each
of these segments of the electorate, just like we did
for slide 10, and we have plotted the results on
graph to the left.
• Even when we take into account going after
“desirable and elusive segments”, primetime still
looks pretty inefficient.
• The takeaway: sub-segments of the electorate are
not that elusive, primetime is not the only way to
get to these voters on TV, in fact we show it can be
a very inefficient way to get to these segments.
Targeting based on efficiency would allow a given
TV budget to achieve a lot more impressions on
target voters.
14. Investigating Claim # 3: buying primetime is the only way to get to the
“large” group of voters who watch only primetime
• To assess this claim, we need to take a look at
prime-time viewers to determine if they are
exclusively primetime viewers.
• How are we going to do that?
Weds,NBC, Houston, 4QViewers on
channel
15. John Doe
Jane Doe
Sally Doe
Pete Doe
Investigating Claim # 3: buying primetime is the only way to get to the
“large” group of voters who watch only primetime
Mon 2pm Mon 3pm Mon 4 pm Weds 8pm Weds 9pm Thurs 11AM Thurs 12AM Thurs 1PM... ... ... ...
NBCNBC
NBC OFF
NBCNBC
NBCTNT
OFF
HGTV
OFF
OFF
OFF
HGTV
BRVO
OFF
OFF
OFF
CNN
ABC
OFF
HGTV
OFF
OFF
OFF
HGTV
BRVO
OFF
OFF
OFF
CNN
ABC
The tuners are all knowing…
First, we collect all the tuners data
for those tuners that turned on
NBC in the prime-time window
highlighted on the previous slide
16. John Doe
Jane Doe
Sally Doe
Pete Doe
Investigating Claim # 3: buying primetime is the only way to get to the
“large” group of voters who watch only primetime
Mon 2pm Mon 3pm Mon 4 pm Weds 8pm Weds 9pm Thurs 11AM Thurs 12AM Thurs 1PM... ... ... ...
NBCNBC
NBC OFF
NBCNBC
NBCTNT
OFF
HGTV
OFF
OFF
OFF
HGTV
BRVO
OFF
OFF
OFF
CNN
ABC
A&E
OFF
FOX
OFF
TNT
OFF
NBC
OFF
TNT
OFF
NBC
FX
The tuners are all knowing…
Then, we look throughout rest of week to
figure out if we could have put an ad in
front of them somewhere that is not
prime-time broadcast
17. Investigating Claim # 3: buying primetime is the only way to get to the
“large” group of voters who watch only primetime
All viewers
PrimaryRepublican
Voters
Non-partisan
general election
only voters
Wednesday night NBC primetime Houston viewers broken out by how many non-
prime-broadcast + cable segments (30 min) were watched that week • Contrary to popular belief,
the number of people who
only watch primetime is
very small, as we can see
primetime viewers watch
lots of other non-primetime
segments throughout the
week.
• The takeaway: the number
of individuals who only
watch primetime is very
small, so this fails as a
justification for it’s purpose
19. Campaigns & buying news on the broadcast Big 4: The status quo
Context
• When it comes to broadcast news (e.g. your local 6am news, NBC nightly news,
your local late night news), campaigns often fall back on a “rule of thumb”
which says that buying news is a good thing.
- The reasoning goes that those people who care about local news, care about what is
going on in the communities/state/country they live in, and so are likely to vote. This
means you are targeting your buys efficiently when you buy broadcast news.
• What this means is that campaigns, either explicitly or implicitly, instruct their
buyer to buy news programs on the big 4 broadcast channels (FOX, NBC, CBS,
ABC).
• In the slides that follow, we examine whether broadcast news is worth buying
20. Investigating Claim: you are buying efficiently if youbuy broadcast news
• Consider the Houston NBC affiliate in
Houston (KPRC), whose news programs and
prices to buy spots during those new
programs are shown in the chart to the left
• If this is all you see, it’s pretty hard to tell
whether you should buy any off this, other
than doing so because of the “Rule of
Thumb” which says you should buy
broadcast news
21. Investigating Claim: you are buying efficiently if youbuy broadcast news
• But what if, using set-top-box data, we can
understand how many viewers were actualy
watching a given news program, on any day
of the week at any time.
• Further, if we know a news program has
20,000 viewers, and it would cost us $800 to
buy a spot during that news program, we
can calculate that program’s cost-per-
impression for all viewers. We now know
the “value” of all programs relative to each
other.
• But wait, a campaign doesn’t care about all
viewers. This is an election, we care about
the viewers we want to persuade.
- We don’t care about making impressions on
non-registered voters
- We don’t care about making impressions on
those voters who are registered but aren’t going
to turn out
- We don’t care about making impressions on
hard partisans who already know who they are
going to vote for.
22. Investigating Claim: you are buying efficiently if youbuy broadcast news
• So instead of figuring out how efficient it is
to talk to “all viewers”, figure out how
efficient it is to talk to just the voters a
targeted R vs. D campaign cares about
• For example, we can create this new
universe displayed on the right. Unlike “All
Viewers”, this universe, called “Non-Partisan
General Election Voters”, looks a lot more
like what we want to target in a targeted R vs
D election:
- Only registered voters
- Only voters likely to show up in the coming
election
- Only those voters who are not hard partisans,
because hard partisans already know who they
are going to vote for regardless of what they are
shown.
• Now we know exactly what an impression is
costing us to talk to the voters we actually
want to talk to. This allows to
- Select which news programs we buy based on
efficiency. This allows us to maximize the
impact of a given TV budget, by stretching dollar
for maximum impressions on targeted voters
Example of good value
Example of bad value
23. Investigating Claim: you are buying efficiently if youbuy broadcast news
• But what if this isn’t a R vs. D race,
what if this is a Republican primary?
How am I supposed to figure out
which news programs to buy then?
• Answer: just define a new target, and
solve for each news program’s
efficiency
• On left, we have inserted Republican
Primary Voter efficiency calculations.
24. Campaigns & buying news on the broadcast Big 4: The status quo
• We can now visualize this data, and see
exactly what number of impressions on
targeted voters a program will get us, for
what price, and at what efficiency (cost
per impression)
Costtobuyanadonprogram
Cost per impression on targeted voter paid when buying a program
= 1,000 Targeted Voter Impressions = 5,000 Targeted Voter Impressions
Note: some news programs were left off this chart because they were off-the-chart bad
Houston’s NBC News programInventory – Republican Primary Targeting
25. Campaigns & buying news on the broadcast Big 4: The status quo
• We can now visualize this data, and see
exactly what number of impressions on
targeted voters a program will get us, for
what price, and at what efficiency (cost
per impression)
• We can now understand what most
desirable inventory looks like, and select
the best buys for the budget we have. On
left, we have put the possible buys into
categories using shades of green
• By the way -this trick (buying on value in
terms of cost-per-impression-on-target
voter) works on all TV programs, not just
news. It is the basis of modern campaign
impression buying.
• And of course, there is more than one
channel offering news inventory..
Costtobuyanadonprogram
Cost per impression on targeted voter paid when buying a program
= 1,000 Targeted Voter Impressions = 5,000 Targeted Voter Impressions
Note: some news programs were left off this chart because they were off-the-chart bad
Bestbuys
Nextbestbuys
DecentBuys
Stretchbuys
Hardtojustify
Houston’s NBC News programInventory – Republican Primary Targeting
26. Campaigns & buying news on the broadcast Big 4: The status quo
• When we add in other ABC and FOX into
the mix, we can very quickly see that there
is plenty of inventory to buy at very good
value
• Q: So what about CBS? Or what about a
list of which programs to buy specifically
(you didn’t label the bubbles!). A: This is
part of what we provide campaigns who
work with us, so hire us.
• Big takeaway: the rule of thumb that says
“broadcast news is worth buying” is
wrong. Some news is worth buying, some
is definitively not worth buying.
- To separate out which is worth it and which is
not, you have to drill down to cost-per-
impression –targeted-voter.
• When you buy based on value, you can
maximize the impressions a given TV
budget will deliver you, and increase the
odds your candidate wins
Costtobuyanadonprogram
Cost per impression on targeted voter paid when buying a program
= 1,000 Targeted Voter Impressions = 5,000 Targeted Voter Impressions
Note: some news programs were left off this chart because they were off-the-chart bad
Houston’s NBC, Abc, & Fox News programInventory – Republican PrimaryTargeting
28. Status Quo – to buy or not to buy football
Context
• When it comes to football, a Rule-Of-Thumb we hear says that buying
football is a no-brainer
- The reasoning is usually rather simple, people live-view (as opposed to DVR)
football at greater rates than other programs, and lots of people watch them, so
they are worth buying
• In the slides that follow, we examine whether football buys are universally
smart
29. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• On the graph to the left, you see the
Houston viewership of two NFL games
played at the same time on Saturday
Oct 5th , by minute
• First-glance thoughts:
- Viewership in these gamers is not
steady, so I am going to be very
interested not only in the price I might
pay for an ad, but also that ad’s location
in the game
Houston NFL Viewers
(Oct 5, Mid-afternoon Games)
Halftime Start
Halftime starts
Halftime Return
Halftime Return
Viewers
30. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• Some observations from these two games:
• It helps to have a good lead-in
- In this case, the Chiefs/49ers game benefited
from the Cowboys/Texans game (a local game to
this market) that played right before it on same
channel
• Half-time penalty
- Games lost 15-30% of their audience after half
time, so you better not pay the same rate for a
1st half as and a second half ad
• Games can get a second wind from hour-
breaks and other games ending
- This wind will be “caught” if game is close
(Chiefs/49ers), and quickly lost if it’s a blowout
(Cardinals/Broncos
• All this serves to say, the rule for buying
football simply can’t be “it’s all good”
Houston NFL Viewers
(Oct 5, Mid-afternoon Games)
Halftime Start
Halftime starts
Halftime Return
Halftime Return
Viewers
31. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• Beyond tactical observations that suggest
not all football buys are good, or at least that
some buys are a lot better than others, we
need to dig deep to figure out if buying
football is, as claimed, “worth it”
• The graph to the left shows the viewership
of sub-segments of the electorate by minute
in the Cardinals Broncos game. In this case,
the sub-segments are types of voters by
party and types of elections they turn out
for. We could just as easily observe a custom
group we have created for a given election,
e.g. “likely undecided voters”, or “soft-
oppose-ballot-issue-3 voters”
• By looking at the people we care to truly
target in a race, we start to understand what
we would “get” from a campaigns
perspective, for placing an ad at any given
minute during the game.
Houston NFL Viewers – Cardinals Vs. Broncos
By sub-segment of electorateViewers
32. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• Now, let’s assume we are running a
traditional Republican vs. Democrat general
election campaign.
• A desirable segment to target in this election
might be the non-hard partisans. We have
blown up their viewership from the previous
slide in the graph to the right
• Now that we know how many target voters
we are going to be reaching with a given ad,
we can calculate efficiency to reach that
audience during the game…
Houston NFL Viewers – Cardinals Vs. Broncos
By sub-segment of electorateViewers
33. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• In fact, in this case, we are going to show
what efficiency would be based on different
price points offered to us. We do this
because we have noticed the cost for buying
ads in football games can vary wildly.
• Using this graph, we can now determine
what cost-per-impression on targeted voter
is going to cost us, based on the price a
channel is asking us to pay and when our ad
airs
- For example, if the station is asking for $12,500
for the spot, and our spot airs at 4:15, we know
we will be paying $1.50 per impression
- Now, we can make rational assessment:
Is $1.50 per that impression worth it, or
would we rather have 3 mail pieces to
those voters?
Is $1.50 for that impression worth it, or
would we rather acquire 15X the
impressions against these targeted
voters at 10 cents an impression
purchased during other shows during the
week?
Houston NFL Viewers – Cardinals Vs. Broncos
Cost per impression based on spot price
Costperimpressionontargetvoter
34. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• This graph also allows us to ask some tough
questions.
• Earlier in this deck, we demonstrated you could
buy this audience on the news for well under 20
cents an impression.
• While it is true that football is live-viewed at
rates higher than other programming, the cost
does not seem justified.
• Consider the case of an ad coting you $7500,
one of many quotes we received for a game
airing in Houston. Based on the blue line to the
left, let’s say we paid $1 per impression.
• To make football worth it, relative to news
efficiency, we’d have to believe that only 1 in 5
viewers of the news is watching live, and thus
actually watching our commercials. That just
does not seem plausible. Who records the 5:30
AM news to watch that night?
Houston NFL Viewers – Cardinals Vs. Broncos
Cost per impression based on spot price
Costperimpressionontargetvoter
35. Investigating Claim: buying football is a general good practice, it has a lot of viewers
and since most of them are live viewers, it is “worth” it
• So to review, football does have a lot of viewers,
and it does have the advantage that a very high
portion of it’s viewers are live-watching the
program.
• That being said, tactical considerations, like time
ad airs in game, which game we are talking
about, quality of lead in, have a lot to do with a
particular ad placement’s worth
• Further, and perhaps more importantly, price
still matters, even for football. Football
demands a high premium. And even when taken
into account the live-viewer advantage, it many
cases it is going to be hard-pressed to deliver the
value we would need to see.
• The takeaway: “Buy Football” is too general a
rule. The nuances surrounding a potential buy
must be taken into account to determine if a
football ad would be good relative to other
buys that could have been made with the
money
Houston NFL Viewers – Cardinals Vs. Broncos
Cost per impression based on spot price
Costperimpressionontargetvoter
37. Conclusion
• Primetime analysis takeaways:
- Lots of primetime is not “worth it”. We could take the same $4k we might spend on a prime time ad and put it behind lots of other buys that would
yield lots more impressions on the voters we are trying to persuade
- Politically desirable sub-segments of the electorate are not that elusive, primetime is not the only way to get to these voters on TV, and in fact we show it
can be a very inefficient way to get to these voters. Targeting based on efficiency would allow a given TV budget to achieve a lot more impressions on
target voters.
- The number of individuals who only watch primetime is very small, so this fails as a justification for it’s purpose
• Broadcast news analysis takeaways:
- The rule of thumb that says “broadcast news is worth buying” is wrong; some news is worth buying, some is definitively not worth buying
- To separate out which is worth it and which is not, you have to drill down to cost-per-impression-on-targeted-voter for each show.
• Football analysis takeaway:
- “Buy Football” is too general a rule. The nuances surrounding a potential buy must be taken into account to determine if a football ad would be good
relative to other buys that could have been made with the money
• Biggest Message: the rules of thumb we typically hear around campaigns as it relates to buying TV were generated in an era before we
had the ability to evaluate and value every single possible buy relative to our political audiences; upon deep examination, we have
found these rules to be some combination of incorrect, over-generalized, or conditionally valid.
