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TV advertising in Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)
Lauri Potka avatar
Written by Lauri Potka
Updated over a year ago

Charateristics of TV

TV advertising is typically among the largest media in the marketing budget for large enterprises, and often among the first offline channels that ecommerce companies activate after they have reached the saturation point for digital channels. TV advertising offers an opportunity for companies to showcase their products or services in a visual and engaging way, by using a combination of visuals, sound, and storytelling.

One of the main advantages of TV advertising is its ability to reach a large audience, while at the same time offering some targeting options. For example, a demographic targeting approach might be used by showing TV ads in connection with channels and programs that are targeted towards a certain demographic.

Metrics for TV

TV advertising often has quite granular metrics for measuring its activity level. The most important concept for TV is the rating point measure, which indicate the amount of exposure that an audience has had to the TV ad:

  • Gross Rating Point (GRP): How much of the total population the ad has reached;

  • Target Rating Point (TRP): How much of the targeted audience the ad has reached. Target audience is a subgroup of the total population and is chosen separately for each campaign.

Both GRP and TRP are measured in percentages, e.g. 1 GRP is 1% of the population and 1 TRP is 1% of the target audience.

As the duration of the TV ad can vary, typically between 10-30 seconds, TRPs between two different TV ads are often not directly comprable. A typical approach for making TRPs comparable across TV ads, is to normalize them all to be equivalent to a 30 second ad, and call it TRP30.

For tracking TV spend, following metrics are typically available:

  • Gross Spend: What was the spend on the ads with list prices

  • Net Spend: What was the spend on the ads, after media discounts (e.g. seasonal or other discounts)

Attributes in TV data

TV data is typically available on a TV-spot level and includes following attributes:

Dimensions

Metrics

Spot attributes (name, id/code)

Advertiser attributes (at least name)

Campaign attributes (name, id, type..)

Time of the spot (Year, month, week, day, time..)

TV Channel

Spot timing (prime, off-prime)

Spot length

Position in break (PIB)

Program before

Program after

TRP, TRP30 (potentially shown with different target audiences)

GRP metrics

Spend metrics (gross, net)

Including TV in Marketing Mix Modeling

While data specifications for Marketing Mix Modeling can vary depending on the context, a good starting point for TV is to use TRP30 as an input metric in the model.

TRP30 is better than TRP, because TRPs are not comparable if spots are with different lenghts

TRP30 is better than the spend-metrics, because it's a more accurate estimate for how much exposure the target audience has received for the ads, whereas spend metrics are influenced by media price changes.

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