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Do We Really Need an Interactive Gross Rating Point (iGRP)?
May 31, 2006
First a bit about Gross Ratings Points, before we add the ubiquitous i. A Gross Ratings Point (GRP) is an old media relic, a trace of that outmoded practice of extrapolating what the nation's 110 million households are watching based on 5,100 strong. One GRP = 1% of these 110 million TV households based on the sample of 5,100 actual TV households culled from a mere 56 markets across the much-more-than-fifty-six markets of the United States. I'm not kidding.
So this 1% of 5,100 TV households across 56 markets allows for the unit GRP to be expressed as costs per point (CPP) when TV advertising is being purchased. Sounds quite quaint when compared to our own Pay Per Click (PPC) system, where each unit of cost is an actual, live visitor actually engaging with the brand advertised via an actual, live click to the brand site, but it's worked for so long, right?
Cory Treffiletti warms my heart with her objection in her OnlineSPIN article today:
The problem is that Nielsen data is becoming less and less valuable at an alarming speed, as consumers' media consumption behavior changes.
That is indeed the rub, when you're basing pricing on 1% of a 1% that doesn't even sample 30.34% of the nation's TV markets nor account for the fact that sitting down and watching TV programming as it is broadcast is rapidly becoming a quaint relic of the past in and of itself. So Cory is spot on when she asks why we would want to add an i to make our industry Gross when the pricing model itself is becoming too gross to work anymore anyway:
My point with all of this is that a GRP only works if the model for buying is on a cost per point. If we revise the counting and measurement methodologies to reflect actual delivery or actual exposure in the way that we currently buy online, then an estimated share is no longer applicable, and we can revise the model based on impressions or OTS (opportunity to see). A few years ago, I tried to revise the buying model to reflect cost per visitor rather than cost per impression, and for a little while that worked, too, but it became onerous and didn't have the strength to stay in place, nor does the GRP--not until the methodology for measurement from Nielsen includes all opportunities for exposure and actual viewership.
Like her, I'm for a unifying apples-to-apples old-media-to-new unit of advertising cost someday, but why condescend from our accurate current system to their fanciful one? iRegression seems to be a move in the wrong direction.
see all posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at May 31, 2006 10:15 PM
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