Acceleration Media pioneers universal metric for online media evaluation in South Africa

Acceleration Media's online GRP tool is an audience measurement method that combines Acceleration Media's ad-serving data with demographic information from the OPA/Nielsen's panel. This allows Acceleration Media to forecast reach and frequency for online advertising campaigns in the same way as many marketers and media planners in offline media forecast reach and frequency.

Says Marcus Stephens, new business development manager at Acceleration Media: "Over the past few years, we have seen Internet penetration in South Africa rise from six percent of adults (about three million people) to 25% (seven and half million people). Yet we have not seen Internet advertising spend increase by the same amount - it still only accounts for 1.5% of all ad-spending.

“One reason for this is that media planners have lacked a metric to establish marketing budget allocation for the online environment. It's clear that we require a universal media evaluation approach."

Acceleration Media believes GRPs are an ideal way to benchmark budgets across the offline and online world. GRPs were first used in the USA as a TV measurement but can be equally applied to other media types, and across media types.

“The perception that traditional branding metrics are not possible or meaningful for digital media is incorrect. The online channel won't maximise its appeal to brand marketers until the basic metrics that have been relied on for years in offline media are available for digital media planning,” says Stephens.

GRPs are used to summarise the exposure opportunities (expressed as a percentage of the target universe) for all the elements in a media schedule. A single GRP is one percent of the target market reached once. As a measure of campaign performance, it is usually related to the cost of the campaign.

GRPs provide answers to two key questions that marketers are asking when they measure online branding effectiveness: How successfully and efficiently did I reach my target audience, and did my advertising influence my target's attitudes towards, perceptions of, and behaviours around my brand?

The GRP metric answers the fundamental question about reach - how many people had a chance to see the brand's message? Reach is a simple but powerful criterion for success in marketing, and has become the currency by which traditional media is bought and sold.

Marketers want to know how many targeted people were reached as well as the percentage of the total target population this reach represents. They want to know, for example, that they have reached one million women ages 18 to 49, which is 14% of a total target universe of seven million.

With its new GRP methodology and tool, Acceleration Media is able to produce digital media plans that forecast target reach, frequency and GRPs at a website level. This will allow digital marketers to determine whether the impressions delivered by one group of ad placements are likely to be more valuable than those on another when the goal of the campaign is reach and frequency to a specified audience. The GRP tool - used in conjunction with existing tools - will ensure a more robust measurement of digital campaigns.

"GRP has the advantage of providing a simple and intuitive way for media planners to compare performance across media as well as to set media budgets to ensure maximum efficiency and return on investment," concludes Stephens. "By comparing media in a uniform way and understanding the budgets we need to achieve our expected reach and frequency, we are able to drive better performance across all channels."