Everyone will tell you, communication is a major pillar of development for businesses. And as proof, from January to September 2020, more than 43,000 advertisers (1) communicated despite the context of the health crisis. With so many players, the advertising market is dense, complex and it is sometimes difficult to know where to start.
Taking these difficulties into account, it is essential to stand out from your competitors thanks to an original communication strategy and an optimized media plan to distinguish yourself. The latter requires having analyzed and benchmarked the communication campaigns of its competitors. To do this, there is nothing like analyzing the media planning and advertising investment of your sector of activity.
In this article, we explain the steps to follow to analyze and compare the advertising investments of your competitors.
#1 List your competitors and their sector of activity
First, establish an exhaustive list of your competitors and their sector of activity.
First, establish an exhaustive list of your competitors and their sector of activity.
This step will help you select data into an advertising investment analysis tool. The best way to do this is to use leading suppliers on the market: Kantar, but also ScoringMedia or Ebiquity.
#2 Consult the overall gross budgets spent on advertising and the frequency of communication
Once this list is drawn up, you will be able to analyze their advertising expenditure and their communication frequency.
If you have a subscription to Kantar Media advertising investment data, you can then analyze the overall gross budgets of your competitors. In this case, it is interesting to detect the communication periods favored by competitors:
- over the previous year to establish whether there is seasonality in their advertising spending or whether their investments are sporadic;
- over the current year;
- An analysis over several years will also give you trends: what are the emerging levers, have any of your advertisers divested from a media, which one and why, etc.
#3 Check their advertising investment by media type and media brand
Once their overall budgets have been inventoried, you will then need to determine in what types of media, and on which media brands, your competitors communicate. This check will allow you to establish whether your competitors are spreading their message in press, TV, radio, billboards and the Internet.
Once this verification is complete, you can take a closer look by listing the media brands in which they invest the most. This will give you an idea of the direction of your future media plan and the advertising spaces to prioritize.
Naturally, it's up to you to see whether your strategy will consist of deploying systems similar to those of your competitors or, on the contrary, taking the opposite approach. Across the budget, favoring media or uncrowded periods can be relevant.
#4 Analyze GRP, cost to GRP, audience share and advertising share of voice
Knowing the GRP of your competitors is a real plus for your strategy because you will be able to know the average number of advertising contacts on your target that they were able to reach.
To know the GRP of your competitors, and the cost to GRP, you will need an advertising investment analysis tool like AdMonitor and ad hoc data subscriptions.
Share of voice is defined as the share of one of your competitors' advertising budgets over a given period, divided by your brand's total market spend over the same period. It allows you to compare your advertising investments with those of your competitors.
The audience share is the ratio of the volume of contacts generated by your campaign to all contacts generated by the sector (therefore the sum of your competitors).
#5 Detect purchasing strategies
After all these steps, you should be able to identify your competitors' media strategies. A simple sort on the appropriate variable(s) will allow you to detect the following:
- a seasonality in the waves of communication,
- the preferential locations purchased by this or that brand,
- the format(s) used,
- the duration of the communication wave and
- the time slots in which they broadcast the most advertising messages.
#6 Detect your competitors’ purchasing targets
If your competitors communicate in traditional media, and more specifically TV and radio, you can detect their purchasing target based on the audience of the media in which they broadcast their message. Indeed, the specificity of a tool like AdMonitor is that it combines two data sources from the main media research institutes: Médiamétrie and Kantar. In other words, you can calculate the audiences for all campaigns that have been delivered. And this, on the socio-demographic target(s) of your choice. From then on, by “playing” your competitor's plan on a list of twelve standard targets and classifying them by decreasing coverage, you will have a strong presumption of the target on which the plan was purchased (failing this, it is probably a target close to that which gives the best coverage).
But the detection of the competitor's purchasing target can also be done with even more relevance by using the affinity rate.
Affinity makes it possible to measure the ability of a medium to reach the intended target without losing an audience. It is expressed by an index, calculated by the following ratio: Audience share on the target/audience share on the target together. We can also calculate the Affinity by the coverage ratio (Target / Target together).
Would you like to know more about advertising investment or our AdMonitor tool ? We talked about it in a dedicated webinar, the replay of which is available here.
(1) Source: Unified barometer of the advertising market H1 2020 VS 2019
