PSA 101: The Language of Television Advertising and PSAs

Every industry has its own language. That’s true for broadcast advertising in general and for public service announcements more specifically. Learning to speak the lingo can help you understand how well your PSA is performing. Therefore, if you have never heard of a DMA, are confused about impressions, or need a refresher on dayparts, this guide is for you. We cover the who, what, when and where so you can feel fluent in the language of TV PSAs.

Airings: How Many Times Was Your PSA Shown on Television?

Running a television PSA campaign is all about getting stations and networks to donate free airings to your organization to deliver your message. An airing occurs when your message is run by stations. Since you cannot simultaneously watch every television station in the nation to see if your PSA is being aired, you need help from Nielsen.

Nielsen is a marketing research company that monitors television stations across the country and can detect when a specific advertisement airs. Advertisements that need to be tracked are encoded using a watermarking technology called SIGMA. This allows stations to determine when and where each airing of occurs.

Today, new technologies are coming online that allow media research companies to identify spots that run on streaming television using television set-top boxes. However, with most PSAs airings occurring in broadcast television (also known as linear TV) free airings on streaming television is not yet a common event.

What is an Impression: How Many People Saw Your PSA?

Impressions are the measure of how many people watched a commercial on television. In general, Nielsen measures impressions based on the number of television sets tuned in to a particular program. That means two people watching a television together count as a single impression. However, if they watch separately on two sets in different rooms they can count as two impressions.

Stations use impressions to determine how much to charge an advertiser to air commercials during specific programs and at different times of the day. Advertisers use impressions to determine if a program reaches the right audience for their products and services. Impressions are important in nonprofit marketing because donated PSA ad time operates like paid advertising. Nonprofits use also use impressions as one measure to evaluate the effectiveness of the donated media they receive.

Since the early days of television, Nielsen has maintained a panel of viewers who statistically represent the population of all television viewers. Today the panel is made up of 42,000 “Nielsen families.” Starting this year, Nielsen added information from over a million digital set-top boxes in its effort to improve the accuracy of its reporting.

In thinking about impressions, it is always important to remember that it is a measure of television set activity.  It does not tell you if some people left the room to get a snack, or if someone left the television on to keep their dog company.

Demographics: Who Saw Your PSA?

Now that we know how many people were exposed to a message, the next question might be: who were these people? Demographics are data describing the characteristics of a group of people, in this case, TV viewers. Here again we turn to Nielsen to identify characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity and more.

Since PSA do not have the ability to select the stations and programs they air on like in paid advertising, it is helpful to know whom they reached. The one possible exception is Spanish language PSAs. Here at least we know that a PSA was targeted at a specific type of station. However, even here, demographic profiles can vary widely from station to station, making overall Nielsen demographic trends important to review.

What is a DMA: Where Was Your PSA Shown?

Knowing where a message was delivered is also important. To do this, Nielsen carved the United States into 210 designated marketing areas (DMA). Some DMAs cover large geographical areas. Others are very small but densely populated. New York (which includes New York City, Long Island, and parts of New Jersey, and Connecticut) covers a small geographic area inhabited by over 21 million people. Glendive Montana covers a broad area with under 8,000 people.

The key thing to know is that a DMA covers a geographic area where the people share some characteristic that interest marketers. For nonprofit organizations, DMAs help you to understand what geographic areas you are reaching with your message and how intensively you are reaching them. At Connect360, we show this information in our Station Airing Detail report that provides a breakdown of activity by DMA and by station within each DMA.

Dayparts: What Time of Day Did Your PSA Air?

Another factor that influences who sees your PSA is the daypart in which it runs. Dayparts are the time segments that broadcast stations use to determine when programming should run. If you have heard people talk about “prime time” or “late night” television, those people were talking about dayparts.

Although different stations may have slightly different ways of dividing the day, the following is a common list of dayparts and the hours they cover.

• Early morning, 5 AM – 9 AM
• Daytime, 9 AM – 4 PM
• Early Fringe 4 PM – 8 PM
• Prime Time 8 PM – 10 PM
• Late Evening 10 PM – 1 AM
• Late Night 1 AM – 5 AM

Different demographic groups may be watching at different times of the day. For example, stay at home parents with small children may watch during the Daytime daypart while adults and teens are the more likely audience for Late Fringe.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM): The Key Metric in Media Valuation

Cost is usually tied to volume in some way. When buying potatoes, you’ll pay per pound. When buying diamonds, you’ll pay per carat. Advertising is calculated by Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM). In figuring out how much something cost, you need a way to standardize what you are buying. To calculate this, you take the price a station charges to run a paid airing and divide it by how many thousands of people Nielsen said watched the program.

When you do this you may find one program had a $50 CPM and another a $30 CPM. Why the difference? Just like in diamonds, which are not all the same quality, some audiences are more valuable to advertisers.

Connect360 calculates the number of impressions from its Nielsen audience database and the CPM from the SQAD/Guidelines media valuation service. This allows us to value every airing a TV PSA receives (last year we valued over 2.7 million TV PSA airings!). On average, a typical PSA campaign we distribute generates over $5 million in donated ad time, with some campaigns receiving $20 -30 million per year and some even more. Return on Investment for the TV PSAs we distributed last year was over 200 times what nonprofit organizations invested to distribute it.

More PSA Basics to Explore

Now that you speak the language of broadcast television PSAs, we hope you feel more prepared to share and value your PSAs. You may be wondering about different types of PSAs and how they fit into your campaign strategy. Learn how Digital Marketing makes it easy to track advertising results for PSAs. If you have questions about broadcast PSAs, digital PSAs or anything else related to public service announcements, we are here to help. Contact us with your questions.

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