FIPP Award winner: Conscious Reach, the new planning metric

Axel Springer won a gold FIPP Insight Award in the category Best Use of Insight B2B. Their Award entry shows the development of a new metric for media effectiveness: ‘Conscious Reach’. The old metrics are not enough in times of Google and Facebook, Axel Springer says. ”Conscious Reach“ is their new approach to analyze, evaluate and optimize media planning strategies and channel decisions. « For the first time ever, cause-effect relationships can be included in media planning alongside purely descriptive features such as reach, CTP and affinity. »

Quality of contact drives advertising impact

Reach, affinity and CPT are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of media channels. Reach must be more qualified, because the quality of the contact drives the advertising impact, according to Axel Springer. That is the reason they started this study to find a new metric, better suited to today’s media landscape.

For this project, the media company formed a partnership with a media agency, advertising clients, science and research institute to combine knowledge and to promote the establishment of a new standard to measure and compare media effectiveness. Their award winning work is only the first step and will be followed by more in-depth research this year.

A new measure based on real impact

A first study in 2018 showed that social media does not come close to classic media brands in terms of “Conscious Reach”. Classic media like print-based brands or TV are more top-of-mind and more likely to receive the relevant attention from the reader/user.

Graph most important and reliable news sources

A lot of relevant data is available for classical media, like print media, TV, radio and so on within market-media studies in Germany. But there is no comparable standard for social media and Google. Axel Springer states that qualitative weighting factors are therefore needed, based on the real impact for individual media genres in order to create a predictable measure.
Graph advertising recall per media type

This new measure, including reach, affinity and CPT, enables a transparent, comparative positioning of TV, print, radio and social media. Axel Springer promotes the “Conscious Reach” as a new standard to evaluate media effectiveness for all media – classical and social. Advertisers will get a deeper understanding of the advertising effectiveness, but also have the possibility to spend their advertising money better and more effectively.

Reach, reputation, attention, content

The “Conscious Reach 2.0” project leverages a multi-method study design combining a secondary meta-analysis of applied and scientific research (approx. 1800 studies, verified sources that investigate causal relationships), qualitative interviews and focus group discussions(110 interviewees / participants) as well as a combination of explicit and implicit (psychophysiological) methods.

As the first main result of the analysis it can be stated, that the “Conscious Reach” consists of four relevant drivers: reach, reputation, attention and content.

Graph conscious reach media types

Next steps?

These dimensions for the “Conscious Reach 2.0” now need to be further validated. A new measure, a new index, for the media industry is to be developed in an application- and practice-oriented way.

This index has to be incorporated into media planning as a weighting criterion thereby including cause-effect relationships in media planning alongside reach, CTP and affinity. All advertising impact effects that are normally documented ex-post are bundled in advance and incorporated into the planning process as a key decision criterion.

Axel Springer hopes to spark an international debate in the media industry with their Conscious Reach study, which will result in the aim of setting a new international standard.

Source: Axel Springer

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