Radio stations sell advertising time based on several components, time of day the ad runs, length of the ad in seconds etc… Sales dollars are also based on Area of Dominant Influence (ADI). Can a correlation between a Friends or Followers fan base give us insight into the formula used to calculate the influence a Twitter Re-tweet or Facebook wall post represents?
Old School
In the measurement of radio audience data, geographic area
composed of all the counties influenced by originating stations in a
particular radio station market. For example, the Massachusetts ADI is
composed of all the counties in Massachusetts and New Hampshire where the Massachusetts
radio stations are listened too.
Market researchers also subdivide ratings demographically between different age groups, genders, and ethnic backgrounds; as well as psychographically between income levels and other non-physical factors. This information is used by advertisers to determine how to reach a specific audience.
ADI data lets agencies track the delivery of network ads in local markets to see where their schedules over- and under-deliver. ADI data facilitates the use of spot to compensate for network under-delivery. If the brand management could obtain, or estimate, sales by ADI, media planners could do A-to-S geographic planning, allocating advertising dollars by market sales.
New Skool
What is the value of a social media user pushing out your tweets or recommending your product on their Facebook wall? The simple answer is how wide is that users reach or how many people are Following/Friends of them. There are several services out there that try to qualify the value of a tweet. Ad.ly is one such service that looks at how many followers you have and although a user is allowed to set the price an advertiser may pay them there is certainly a scale in place where someone like Kim Kardashian with 2.6 mil followers gets $10,000 for a tweet, Guy Kawasaki with 200k followers earns $900 a tweet and someone like me with 2500 followers would be lucky to get $2. So how does Ad.ly work?
“Ad.ly automatically sends one tweet in your feed every day from advertisers that you approve. With Ad.ly, you approve every ad that is sent in your feed. You set the price per tweet that advertisers pay (don’t worry, our system will suggest a price for your account).”
The theory is very similar to Radio’s ADI, where online, if you were to drop a pebble in the water metaphorically a tweet, the following concentric rings visualized as ripples, would gently sweep outwards just as a users followers would read their tweet and re-tweet the post.
The concept that the entire country could be divided into marketing areas by radio station listening patterns is a modern media planning idea born in the 1960’s.
In todays online market, specifically around social media, many are stumped by the problem of defining a common value in the market area, which would satisfy all of their marketing clients in a specific channel as it relates to a users activity with their brand and the relative ROI.