OCD Media was hired by a franchise home painting service to evaluate the buys their media agency made. The agency is question was proud of the prices they were negotiating on TV and radio. We started by evaluating something simple. Whether or not someone owned or rented a home seemed to be the first cut on whether or not they should be targeted. The second cut we made was whether they plan to remodel. Beyond that, differentiating between those who are DIYers or those who hire out was the logical third cut.
When only 3% of the market is your target you need to be smarter about programming selection to reach them. What we found with the media agency’s process was they were reaching more renters and more people with no plans to remodel than who they should have reached.
Their buys were focused on two over-the-air TV stations willing to make deals when they should have been buying local cable. One of the highest-ranking cable networks was The Golf Channel. Golf Channel viewers don’t want to paint their own house. They want to play golf while someone else paints their house. They even missed what turned out to be an obvious choice, HGTV, which had 4X the audience than any over-the-air non contextually relevant program they purchased.
There were some programs on the stations they bought that fit the target, but not by design. It was more by sheer luck. Our issue was there was no process to distinguish between what should have been bought and, more importantly, what should not have been bought.