What you need to know:

• ThinkTV has released the Media Engine, a tool that takes data from 60 advertisers, with a combined annual budget of $450m, and generates an econometric modelling plan.
• ThinkTV CEO Kim Portrate says the results are sound, and despite a strong performance by television in most categories, there was “no jiggery pokery when it came to the data”.
• But other media owners such as OOH, print and radio may be less convinced.

Don't change channel

TV's lobby has built a free tool to figure out how best to spend advertising dollars – but insists it is platform agnostic.  

ThinkTV's Media Engine uses $450 million of GroupM ad spend data from 60 major Australian brands across 10 sectors to generate a four-year econometric model for how to spend a budget and what results to expect.

Advertisers can enter inputs and see how outputs played out in the real world.

There are eight variables to choose from, for example whether it’s a mass market or niche approach, the percentage of sales generated from online, the size of the brand, the media spend, and whether the advertiser wants to minimise risk.

Nine out of 10 of the default values suggest most budget should be spent with television, with just ‘Durable household products’ spending slightly more in search. Out of home, radio and print are rarely more than low single digit percentages of budgets, often one per cent at best.

“From an advertiser point of view, [the Media Engine] makes recommendations at a category level. It’s not Brand A versus Brand B, and it doesn’t take into account the specific needs and requirements of Brand A versus Brand B. That’s not the business we’re in,” ThinkTV CEO Kim Portrate said, adding that the data, which takes into account the past three years of brand spend through GroupM, is sound.

“There are examples where TV isn’t the star of the show… We didn’t comb through the data to only use TV clients – this is real life examples. We can only build a model based on the data that sits underneath it. There was no screening, there was no classification, there was no jiggery pokery when it came to the data we received.”

Portrate says this is a way to improve the briefing process, after a report last year from the Better Briefs Project found 90 per cent of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively.

“At its heart, we’ve got a big fat data lake, we watched the conversation about briefs and the quality of them, and we thought we can actually help democratise some of this data for advertisers,” she said.

She and Steve Weaver, ThinkTV’s Director of Research, Insights and Education, would like to add data from other holdcos but are confident it’s a useful tool already, helping brands add a category benchmark and justify spend.

“Within our industry, people are always trying to get the most efficient media lay down, the biggest bang for their buck,” Weaver said.

“But this one is demonstrating that, ‘Hey, if you’re wanting to really push sales for your clients and maximise sales for your clients, here’s the media channels that will do that best’.”