Advertisers India Pvt Ltd Case Study

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NOT to be QUOTED


ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED - 1972


On January 2, 1972, Mr. A.K. Chatterji, Managing Director of Advertisers India Ltd, Delhi (AIL), and Dr. L. Anant, Professor at a Well-known Institute of Management in Western India (WIMWI), Ahmedabad, were in a meeting of management practitioners and academicians to discuss matters of mutual interest. Their discussion veered around the problem of media planning faced by advertising practitioners. Mr. Chatterji mentioned that media planning was the foremost problem faced by advertising agencies and executives. In his agency itself, several clients spent about a crore of rupees per year on buying time and space in press, radio, and cinema for advertising. Both, Chatterji and Anant, agreed that the problem was significant to be resolved and method(s) of finding the best solution would be of great help to advertising agencies and advertisers. Anant mentioned that such a resolution could be generalized for the use of executives from other sectors.

ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED

Advertisers India Limited was one of the large advertising agencies in India with head office at Delhi and branches at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Its clientele included industrial, consumer durable, and consumer non-durable goods companies. Major share of its earnings, like most other agencies in India, came from consumer non-durable goods companies. The agency provided market research services for developing advertising appeals and advertising strategy recommendation for developing advertisements and media plans. Most of its income came from the 15% discounts given by media companies when they bought time/space. The agency used its judgement to allocate advertisement budget to major media like press, radio, and cinema. Invariably, cinema received greater weightage, if the visual and spoken aspects were more important in the message, and press received a higher proportion, if most buyers of the product were educated and the message could be effectively communicated through written presentation itself. Radio was largely used as a reminder media. 

EXISTING METHOD of PLANNING MEDIA EXPENDITURES

Discussions with the advertisers and advertising agencies revealed the following steps in existing method of media planning:

  1. Decide desired readership in each target group in different zones/ states.

  2. Decide Ad size depending on the space required for the ad copy. 

  3. Decide “must” publications because of high readership among brand users and choose a small list of additional publications compatible with the product type like fashion-oriented publications for fashion product, reproduction quality, etc.

  4. Judgmentally decide a final list of publications by considering readership of individual publications obtained from NRS (National Readership Survey, Operations Research Group, Baroda) in different target groups in different regions. 

  5. Prepare few press media plans so that the total readership of each media plan was close to the desired readership in each of the target groups in different zones and/or states.

  6. Final adjustments about including or excluding publications were made to get close match between actual readership of the media plan and the desired readership, in each target group of customers.

  7. Judgmentally specify a minimum number of insertions as a must to be put in each publication if it was finally selected in the media plan.


In the above process, the executives intuitively tried to see that a certain number of target customers were in the readership of the media plan (assessed through readership data from NRS) and that they had at least a few Opportunities to See (OTS) the advertisement over a period of time (through minimum number of insertions in each publication). The executives of the agency also felt that the effect of advertising was the result of many factors. Putting advertisements in a number of media vehicles only meant that the readers (audience) of those publications had a chance to look at the advertisement (OTS). 

DEVELOPMENT of a PRESS MEDIA PLANNING MODEL

As advertisers in India used press, radio, and cinema media, a model which encompassed all the three media would have been of tremendous value. However, data about radio listenership and cinema viewing was very scanty. As such, development of a rigorous mathematical model for all media would be inconsistent with the crude data base at the point in time. Publication readership data was available from the NRS in various customer classes (by age, educational level, income bracket, rural/urban, occupation, male/female etc). Data could also be accessed on circulation of various newspapers. Also press budgets accounted for nearly 60 – 70% of the total advertising budgets of about 60 crores of rupees in 1972. As such, it was decided to put efforts towards developing a press media model only. 

Chatterji and Anant wondered what the key steps should be. 

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