Understanding why audience figures are important
You want to choose a TV channel that both delivers the biggest possible audience and is affordable within your campaign budget. When you “buy against a CPT”, you are actually only paying the channel for the number of views your TV advert gets.
A CPT is the Cost you pay per thousand views of your TV Advert. Furthermore, you can be specific over which type of viewing audience you are prepared to pay for. For example, if you sell a product targeted to a female audience, you can choose to only pay for the adult female audience.
Useful facts about audience based TV Advertising Campaigns
- Only pay for BARB rated views of your TV Advert.
- You don't over-pay for TV Advertising space if few people are watching.
- You can choose to only pay for the TV audience that best matches your target customer.
- "TV Audiences" are grouped by gender, age, class and house makeup.
- Each view (Impact in TV Media Buying Jargon) refers to the number of times your TV Advert is seen, not how many people see your TV Advert.
- Campaign "Reach" is the figure refers to the number of people that saw your TV Commercial.
- For TV campaigns with larger ad spends, we can often tell you how many people saw your ad 1, 2, 4, or more times (on average).
Spot based TV Advertising
A spot campaign is sold against the number of times a TV Commercial is shown. For instance, you could buy 10 showings on a TV Channel at £500 each. The upside to this is that you can predict exactly how many spots you will have in a campaign and when they will run.
A negative aspect of spot campaigns are that you have no guarantee for the number of BARB rated viewings. So you will still pay £500 for that spot whether a billion people watch it, or even if nobody watches it.
Most TV channels do not sell against spot campaigns. It is mainly the smaller TV channels that sell this way as many are not BARB Rated.
TV Advertising Jargon
- BARB - Broadcasters Audience Research Board. "BARB Rated" means that the TV Channel's audience is sampled to estimate the number of viewers.
- Thinkbox - Information about TV Advertising in the UK.
- Clearcast - The organisation that clears TV Commercials for broadcast
- CPT (or CPM) - Cost per thousand (impacts).
- Impacts - The number of times a TV Advert is watched.
- TVR - Television Ratings. These are shown as a percentage of the audience "Universe". We buy TVRs when buying most TV Advertising campaigns.
- Universe - The number of people that fit within a category. E.g. there are 50,428 people in the "Adults" universe.