Digital media planning now freely available to SA marketers

IAB SA, Effective Measure and global media advertising software and solutions supplier, Telmar, have collaborated to bring media planners a new internet planner on the Telmar dashboard. The planner uses Effective Measure’s demographic data, which has been weighted back to AMPS Internet audience through a meticulous process.

It is freely available to South African marketers, agencies and media sellers who are Telmar clients.The Telmar Internet planner presents its data in a format familiar to media planners, allowing them to plan and integrate their digital spend alongside other media. The tool was developed as a special project of the IAB Measurement Council, which is responsible for accurate measurement of the IAB SA members, and ensures that this measurement benefits the digital industry in South Africa.  “After months of collaborative efforts and the successful integration of Effective Measure data, the dedicated teams of both IAB SA and Telmar are proud to announce the launch of Internet Planner on to the Telmar dashboard,” says Ryan Harris, IAB head of Measurement. “The Internet Planner will bring IAB SA publisher data to a wider audience in the Telmar interface that is already commonly used within the industry. This is another step in making digital planning easier and reducing the barriers to advertising through digital media.” IAB SA has a long-standing relationship with Effective Measure, a global provider of digital audience, brand and advertising effectiveness measurement. For the past four years, Effective Measure has been gathering demographic data through online surveys hosted on IAB publisher sites across desktops and mobile devices, and compiling up to 163 000 active monthly South African demographic profiles, amidst its 1 190 000 profiles worldwide. The greatest challenge the project team has faced has been to meaningfully and accurately transform Effective Measure’s unique browser data into people data weighted back to AMPS, as used in Telmar software. As there cannot be a linear transformation from unique browsers to people, the data had to be weighted back to the number of South Africans who say they have accessed the internet and been active online. This resulted in many months of dedicated teamwork and Telmar representative Martin Urry says, “The methodology used to collect and weight the internet audience data to the AMPS universe included understanding and determining the internet audience from AMPS questions and using the correct questions to weight to, as advised by Peter Langschmidt, managing director of Echo Consultancy. The tool delivers reach and frequency based on the number of page impressions by person and reach in thousands.”Effective Measure’s country manager, Nicolle Harding adds, “Our data has been successfully integrated into the tool to provide a broader ranking and weighting process; and while it is not a linear transformation from unique browsers to people, and the market share will not be exactly the same, it will be similar.”For media planners, the Internet planner is an ideal starting point for the planning process. Internet planner allows for matching target audiences across a variety of websites. This will allow them to effectively identify the best-fit sites for their campaigns and find out how much inventory the site can hold. In understanding this data, strategists can then make full use of digital’s unique ability to cap frequency and re-target people to further enhance the results to match their campaign objectives.The Telmar Internet planner is a significant milestone for South Africa’s digital industry, showing its maturity amid exponential growth.For more information on Telmar, visit www.telmar.co.za.