The Words Your Media Agency Uses (And What They Actually Mean)

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

CPM. Reach. Frequency. GRPs. Sit in enough media meetings and the acronyms start to blur into a language of their own, one that can leave you nodding along without quite knowing what you have just agreed to. That is not because the ideas are complicated. It is because nobody ever stops to explain them in plain English. So here it is: a proper, jargon-free glossary of the terms that come up most, grouped by the question each one is really trying to answer. Bookmark it, share it with your team, or keep it open next time you are on a call with us or anyone else.

How many people actually saw it?

• Reach. The number of unique people exposed to your campaign at least once. A raw count of people, not a percentage.
• Cover. The proportion of your target audience your campaign reached, expressed as a percentage. If your cover is 60%, six in ten of the people you were trying to reach saw your ad somewhere. Reach and cover describe the same idea, one as a number, one as a percentage, and you will hear both used depending on the channel.
• Impressions. The total number of times your ad was served or displayed online, regardless of how many different people saw it. One person scrolling past your ad three times generates three impressions but counts only once towards reach.
• Impacts. The total number of exposures a campaign generates, every time someone in the target audience sees your ad, first time or fifth. Used identically in TV and out-of-home: ten impacts might be ten people seeing an ad once, or one person seeing it ten times.
• Dwell Time. How long someone spends in sight of an ad. A roadside poster gets seconds, a panel on a train platform or in a gym can get minutes, which is a big part of why the amount of story a format can tell changes so much by environment.
• TA (Target Audience). The specific group of people a campaign, or a piece of media inventory, is designed to reach, defined by demographics, location or behaviour.
• ABC1. A traditional UK social grade classification, shorthand for professional, managerial and junior white-collar audiences. Still used as a quick demographic descriptor, particularly in press and out-of-home buying.
• POS (Point of Sale). The environment where a purchase decision actually gets made, such as a supermarket or shop. Used across retail media, in-store advertising and out-of-home alike, not specific to any one channel.

How often did they see it?

• Frequency. The average number of times someone in your target audience was exposed to your campaign, and saw it at all. Reach tells you how many people saw it, frequency tells you how many times each of them did.
• OTS (Opportunities To See). TV’s name for the same idea as frequency. Average OTS and average frequency are the same number, it is just the term you will hear most often in a TV context specifically.
• TVR (Television Rating Point). One TVR equals 1% of your target audience watching a given programme, daypart or ad break. It is the basic building block of TV audience measurement, the rating for a single spot.
• GRP (Gross Rating Point). The total weight of a campaign, built by adding together the TVRs of every spot in it. In out-of-home the same idea is calculated slightly differently, as reach multiplied by frequency, but it answers the same question: how much weight did this campaign carry, altogether.
• Bursts / Flighting. Running your ads in concentrated waves with gaps in between, rather than continuously. Used to build real impact around key moments, like Black Friday, without paying to be on air every single week.
• Dayparting / Day Part. Scheduling your ads to run at the times of day your audience is most likely to be watching, listening or passing by, rather than spreading spend evenly across all hours. You will hear this across TV, radio and digital out-of-home screens alike.
• ROS (Run of Station / Run of Site). Ads scheduled generally rather than at a guaranteed optimal time. Usually cheaper, because you are trading a specific placement for a broader, less predictable one.

How much did it actually cost?

• CPM (Cost Per Mille). The cost to reach one thousand people, or generate one thousand impressions. It is the standard way of comparing cost efficiency across different media, whatever your total budget.
• CPT (Cost Per Thousand). The cost of one thousand commercial impacts for your target audience. Used identically in TV and out-of-home as the standard way inventory in those channels is priced and compared, and in press it is simply an older name for CPM (mille is Latin for a thousand).
• CPC (Cost Per Click). In digital advertising, what you pay each time someone clicks your ad, rather than simply seeing it.
• CPA / CPL (Cost Per Acquisition / Cost Per Lead). What you pay for each completed sale or lead your campaign generates. One of the more direct ways to judge whether a campaign is paying for itself.
• Share of Voice (SOV). Your advertising spend or presence in a given environment compared with your competitors’, usually expressed as a percentage. On a shared digital out-of-home screen you may hear this called SOV/T, share of voice or time, since several advertisers rotate across the same panel.
• Spot Rate. The price of a single advertising slot, such as one radio ad or one TV ad break placement.
• Gross vs Net. Two different ways of expressing the same budget. Gross includes agency commission and any discounts baked in, net is the actual cost once those are stripped out. Worth clarifying which one you are looking at whenever a figure gets quoted, the difference can be substantial.

How well did it actually work?

• CTR (Click-Through Rate). The percentage of people who saw your digital ad and went on to click it, calculated as clicks divided by impressions.
• VTR (View-Through Rate). The percentage of people who watched a video ad through to completion, or to an agreed point, used to gauge engagement with video content.
• Conversion Rate. The percentage of people who took the action you wanted, a purchase, a form fill, a booking, after seeing or clicking your ad.
• Brand Lift. The measurable increase in awareness, favourability or consideration of your brand as a direct result of a campaign, typically tracked through surveys taken before and after.
• Share of Search. The percentage of category-related Google searches that mention your brand by name, increasingly used as an early signal of market share and brand health.
• Attribution. Working out which touchpoint or channel deserves the credit when someone converts. Trickier than it sounds, since most customers see several ads across several channels before they buy.
• Incrementality. Whether a campaign is genuinely driving new sales or leads, rather than simply capturing demand, or sales, that would have happened anyway.
• PCA (Post Campaign Analysis). The round-up of how a campaign actually performed against what was planned, delivered after the activity ends. Worth asking for as standard, not just when something has gone wrong.

How is it actually bought?

• Programmatic. Buying digital ad space automatically through software and real-time auctions, rather than negotiating each placement directly with a publisher.
• Addressable TV. TV advertising that can be targeted to specific households or audience segments, rather than everyone watching a channel seeing the same ad.
• DOOH (Digital Out of Home). Advertising delivered through digital screens instead of printed posters. Several advertisers rotate across the same screen, and creative can change by time of day, weather or a live data feed rather than staying fixed for the whole campaign. It is now the majority of the UK out-of-home market.
• Programmatic DOOH (pDOOH). The automated buying and selling of digital out-of-home screen inventory in real time. Advertisers plan and buy through a Demand-Side Platform, media owners make space available through a Supply-Side Platform, and the two connect instantly. It has opened out-of-home up to smaller budgets and much faster turnaround than a traditional panel booking.
• RTB (Real-Time Bidding). The auction process behind programmatic buying, where ad space is bought and sold in the fraction of a second it takes a webpage to load.
• DSP / SSP (Demand- and Supply-Side Platform). The two pieces of software behind programmatic buying. The DSP is what an advertiser or agency uses to plan, target and buy; the SSP is what a media owner uses to make their inventory available. Together they run the auction.
• Optioning. Provisionally holding advertising space before it is confirmed. In out-of-home specifically, an option typically holds a panel for a client for one week, if it is not confirmed by the deadline, it goes back on the open market. The same idea of holding space before confirming turns up across other channels too, just with different timeframes.
• In-Charge. The fixed period a traditional out-of-home campaign runs for. Standard formats such as 6-sheets, 48-sheets, underground and bus panels all run on a two-week in-charge cycle, part of why booking lead times matter so much.
• Channel-Neutral. An approach, like ours, where the media plan is built around whatever will work best for your objectives and budget, not around whichever channel the agency happens to sell.

None of this is a test. If a term ever comes up in a conversation with us and it is not clear, please do ask. A good media agency should be able to explain what they are proposing and why, in plain English, every time. If you are gearing up for that conversation, our guide on how to brief a media agency is a good place to start.

Want a media plan explained in plain English, from the first conversation?

That is exactly how we work. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will talk you through your options without a single acronym you have not asked for.