Brian Steinberg wrote a great article in Ad Age last week which was hidden on the bottom of Page 6 (come on Ad Age, show Brian some love!) that showcases television networks changing their model based on Propagation Planning ideals. "Plan not for the people you reach, but the people they reach," is what ad agencies want to accomplish and media corporations are now "Selling ads not on the people you reach, but the people they reach."
Greg Liebman, senior VP-ad sales research at CNN and Artie Bulgrin senior VP-research and analytics at ESPN are heading up the efforts at the two media corporations respectively. I'm going to repeat key parts of the article here:
Time Warner's CNN and Walt Disney's ESPN are grappling with the idea that a TV ad should not be judged solely by the number of people it reaches, but also by how many people who see it are spurred to share its message with others.
It's all well and good for a TV network to boast about the ability to lure a sizale crowd, but that's so old school. Today, marketers want to know what subset of that audience talked about their ad with other people, and if that conversation was a positive or negative one.
CNN and ESPN are both working with independent social media firm Keller Fay, which has since June of 2006 been surveying what CEO Ed Keller describes as a "rolling cross-section" of 700 consumers every week, totaling 36,000 a year. The respondents, between the ages of 13 and 69, are recruited to take notes on conversations they have in 15 different categories over a 24-hour period, then contacted again to answer questions about brands and companies they may have discussed. Keller Fay found that it has been able to track 7,000 brand mentions per week, or about 35,000 per year. The firm also works to identify with media outlets via which the commercial was viewed.
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