Assessing the ROI of TV ad spends

Being a consumer brand, marketing is vital in creating awareness and staying relevant in the minds of consumers, especially with numerous brands competing for their attention. This FMCG firm’s marketing team is responsible for allocating budgets for marketing spends, specifically TV, print, and media. TV ad spends are the prime focus.

The key challenge in TV ad spends is the varying rate of available FCT (Free Commercial Time) from channel to channel and also for the same channel over time. Channel viewership is always fluctuating which is why the marketing team needs to understand the cost per rating point (CPRP), which is related to viewership. The team must track the inflation of this cost. How much are they spending for a share of viewership? What are the returns gained from the ad spend?

Issues Identified

• Market data required to track the cost inflation based on viewership across brands is published by the TV audience measurement body, Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC)
• The company employed 3-4 data analysts to manually compute the ROI on TV ad spends based on the CPRP of various channels
• The manual effort involved made this a time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone activity