Are we facing a crisis of audience reach?

Our panel members were concerned about the impact

Overall, our panel members were concerned about the impact these developments are having on our ability to reach audiences, but it would be fair to describe them as worried, as opposed to seeing an outright crisis. As we will discuss, a number of options exist to rearchitect media strategies to deal with the situation.

Producing advertising that people don’t want to avoid

There was a consensus amongst our panel that a significant element in the consumer move to ad-free media is the quality of the advertising itself. After all, if advertising was more engaging and relevant, would people pay to avoid it?

Advertising is part of the culture. It’s a part of the culture of young people, of older people. This will stay. This will go on as long as advertising is relevant for people, it’s entertaining to people, then people will go for that

Klaus-Peter Schulz. OMG

If we want people to remain in ad-funded environments where advertising can reach them, it is incumbent on the industry to create a good user experience with engaging content and place it in the right environments without excessive repetition.Is the concept of ‘reach’ still relevant?
Of course, the concept of a ‘crisis of reach’ only matters if we accept that reach remains a relevant metric in advanced media planning. Some of our experts question how vital it is: are reach, CPMs, CTRs and OTRs being superseded by an emphasis on Return on Investment and performance KPIs like sales? Are these new metrics increasingly replacing the generic concept of campaign ‘reach’?Sarah Ostkamp confirms this evolution of KPIs from Unilever’s perspective, arguing that the success of a campaign is no longer about CTRs or OTRs, that it’s about sales uplift: reaching the right user who buys Unilever’s products.

If reach is no longer the end, it certainly is a means to an end. And to get that reach, you need the quality programming, regardless of the platform. Quality programming and content, regardless of platform, is what I think our members are investing in and making it available on as many platforms as possible