Once torn between “old” media and new, marketers are learning that both work best when working together

By: Samar Farah

At first glance, Papa John’s Pizza would seem to be your traditional brand: a mass-market product with a mass-market audience and a mass-media approach to marketing. But when it comes to measuring this approach, the company is anything but traditional.

Rather, Papa John’s has benefited from a complex, high-tech measurement strategy, blending the massive reach of old media with the robust metrics and real-time data of new media – an approach that signals a new path to gauging ROI among direct marketers.

To maximize its broadcast data, the chain developed TV ads that conclude with call-to-action phrases and direct viewers to the Papa John’s Web site. Software used by Baltimore-based MGH, the pizza maker’s top local-market media buyer, enables media buyers to evaluate and revise buys on a daily basis to yield the most efficient and effective schedules. The metrics are the same as always for TV spots: ratings points and cost per points. However, the difference is that the integration of traditional media and the Web allows MGH to revise and substitute spots based on daily ratings.

Papa John’s mixed-media measurement efforts began shortly after MGH began subscribing to Nielsen’s SIGMA data service. SIGMA tags TV spots with an electronic code, allowing media buyers to closely monitor their ad spots daily to see when and where ads air and which versions are being broadcast. In the past, this sort of data was generated monthly and left to media reps. “We call it ‘managing our buys real-time,’” explains Mike Skandalis, associate media director at MGH, which has also been increasing spending on Internet ads for Papa John’s.

Undeniably, as media channels become more integrated, more marketers are rejecting a world that pits new media against old and leaves them stranded somewhere in between. Instead, they’re searching for more integrated solutions, applying what they’ve learned from new media to improve old channels and using old media to further buttress the new. And, as in the case of Papa John’s, brands are happily leaving the dichotomy between old and new on the cutting-room floor.

It’s a combination that continues to attract proponents. “You can look at stand-alone old media and stand-alone new media and argue that [the latter] is more measurable,” says Eric Schwartzman, managing director of Schwartzman & Associates Inc., a Los Angeles PR firm. “I’m more a proponent of combining bricks and clicks than comparing the old and the new.”

The online promise
The trend has been driven by a number of factors, including the ability to measure old media better and, according to marketing executive Nelson Pratt, an increased skepticism about the oft-touted virtues of the Internet. “The sophisticated algorithms behind [popular sites and search engines] and other commercial spaces – they were just that: algorithms that no one on my side knew enough to work with and question,” recalls Pratt, vice president of brand strategy at health insurance carrier Regence. “Because transactional cost was so low, people assumed they were reaching a more targeted audience, but not nearly as targeted as [had been] claimed.”

Further, says Pratt, the rich vein of consumer information that the Web seemed to offer was often found to be untrustworthy: “Unfortunately, with any database where the record is maintained by an individual with no audit, you need to be skeptical about how much you can trust the information as a marketer.”

But he points out that problems also stem from some marketers’ failure to tune in to the right metrics, like new customers or incremental revenue. Too often, marketers are overly concerned with data points like clicks per minute and page visits. “Because the Internet is so infinitely measurable, many marketers have focused on measuring the wrong things, metrics that are interesting but not helping a company achieve its goals,” says David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. Scott urges marketers to link campaigns back to the company’s overall goals, whether it’s a regional sales increase or a boost in the online conversion rate.