Reach vs Frequency

What is better reach or frequency?

Buying broadcast TV or radio, you choose a target audience, usually based on an age and a gender. The wider you make the age gap, the more likely you will reach some of your potential customers. They associate a number with your advertising and they give it a fancy name: Gross Rating Point (or GRP for short).  

Basically, GRP is a simple formula that multiplies how many average times the target audience heard the message by the percentage of the population that heard the message at least once. Again, advertisers give these terms complicated, physics-like names. They call them Reach and Frequency.

Unsophisticated advertisers think Reach is the most important number. They will go into detail why more people that hear the message will have a better chance for advertising success. They call this chance Exposure.

I hate the word "Exposure" when it's applied to marketing. You can't put a value on exposure. You can't calculate a return on investment. Did someone in a sales department come up with that word knowing full well that if you can't measure it, no one can deny it's effectiveness.

For an ad to get any traction with a target audience, it has to be the right message delivered at the right time, using the right medium to the right person.

I am exposed to over 5000 messages everyday. I will not act on almost any of them. I'm not the right people.

Forget about exposure or reach. Frequency is king. Think about it. The more you hear a message, the more apt you are to remember it if and when you are in the market for purchase.

We ran a campaign once with an average frequency of 13 on a small radio station. The budget was so small we couldn't afford to bring out the big guns. We chose the number seven radio station in the market. The message was fun, energetic, simple and remarkably different. We had very little exposure. 

Everyone thought we were crazy. The client didn't know any better. He just wanted to sell musical instruments.

The client sold out his inventory in three days without any in-store specials.

So the next time you want to do mass advertising, ask yourself a very simple question. Do you want to rent your customers or do you want to own them? Delivering a message via reach is like renting them. Whereas frequency buys ownership of your target audience.