Sample frameDay 330·Marketing · Timing

Nobody buys because they've seen you three times. They buy because they saw you the week they were buying.

Marketing.

Recency Planning

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The question

Look at the schedule you're running now — the launch month, the burst, the fortnight when everything goes out at once — and ask yourself how many of your category's buyers were anywhere near a decision during those weeks, and what the other forty, when they heard nothing at all from you, actually cost.

The idea

Yesterday's frame priced what a gap costs; this morning is about the schedule that decides how many gaps you have. Erwin Ephron was a New York media planner, a founder of the firm Ephron, Papazian & Ephron, who spent the 1990s arguing that the industry's scheduling arithmetic was upside down. The convention he was arguing with came from Herbert Krugman, a researcher at General Electric, who suggested in 1972 that three exposures might be enough for an advertisement to do its work. Planners read that as a floor and built schedules that concentrated weight into short bursts, so that the average viewer got hit three times. Ephron's paper Recency Planning, published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1997, made the opposite case. Buyers aren't all in the market at once. In any given week a small, rotating slice of the category is close to a purchase, and for those people the exposure nearest the decision does most of the work. Which means the second and third hits in the same week land mainly on people who weren't buying, while the buyers who become active the week after you go quiet get nothing at all. His prescription was continuity: buy weekly reach, and stretch it across as many weeks as the budget will carry. The trap is that frequency feels like impact. Three hits in a week looks like a campaign; one a week for a year looks like nothing much happening.

The framework

01
Weeks of presence, not gross impressions.
Change the unit you plan in. Impression totals flatter concentration, because volume gets cheaper the more of it you buy at one time. Count instead how many weeks of the year a buyer could encounter you at all, and what reach you achieve in an ordinary week. Two plans with identical budgets routinely differ by thirty or forty weeks of presence, and that difference never shows up in the impression total. Put both figures at the top of every media plan you approve, and argue about those first.
02
How often does your category actually get bought?
Recency planning calibrates to the purchase cycle. In a weekly category somebody enters the market every few days, and continuity is obviously right. In a five-year purchase — the car, the accounting system, the school — the in-market slice each week is tiny, and the instinct is to save the money for a burst. That instinct is backwards: you can't know which week a given household starts looking, so a small permanent presence catches more of them than a loud fortnight does. Genuinely seasonal categories are the real exception, and there are fewer of those than people claim.
03
Stretch the schedule before you buy the repeat.
On a fixed budget the trade is direct: more people this week, or more weeks. John Philip Jones, professor at Syracuse University, worked with single-source data that matched what households bought to the advertising those same households had seen, and reported in 1995 that one exposure in the week before a purchase produced a measurable effect on its own. That's the case for spending your money on weeks rather than on repeats. So the repeat hit inside a single week is the first thing to give up whenever you need to fund another month of presence.
04
There's a floor, and under it the stretch buys nothing.
Continuity has a limit, and it isn't the calendar — it's how many people a single week reaches. Spread a small budget across all fifty-two and you can end up buying a presence too thin for anybody to notice, which is a year of being technically present and effectively absent. So build the schedule from the floor up: decide the smallest weekly reach you'd count as having been there at all, cost one week at that level, then divide the annual budget by that cost. The answer is the number of weeks you can genuinely hold, and if it comes back at thirty rather than fifty-two, hold thirty properly instead of fifty-two badly. When that number is uncomfortable, narrow the audience before you thin the week: a tighter geography or a single segment lifts weekly reach without adding to the budget.

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