Although people in the online ad industry aren't talking about R&F much anymore, they remain important metrics, albeit for different reasons than for offline media.

It seems like not so long ago, everywhere you looked in this industry you found people gathered together and talking about reach and frequency. They were THE topics du jour.

In offline media, reach and frequency are a given -- criteria by which plan options are measured against one another. They are representative of communications' delivery goals, which marketers use to determine how much the "needle" is moved as a result of their advertising efforts.

It seemed that for a while there, these important measures were going to be just as significant for online advertising as they have been for offline. Every major research and technology company was going to get involved, from NetRatings to Atlas DMT. Even the ARF issued guidelines by which reach/frequency on the Web was to be determined.

But now, silence. No one seems to be talking about it anymore.

Just what is going on with the reach and frequency issue online?

Reach & Frequency Take a New Focus Online

Reach and frequency are still important as they relate to online advertising media planning, but the angle taken – and therefore, the emphasis – has shifted somewhat.

The silence on the topic isn't that reach and frequency has become less important: "The problem is that it was never finished," says David Smith, president of Mediasmith in San Francisco and chair of the Advertising Research Federation's Online Media Council. He points out that reach and frequency as a consideration has a different focus within the agency community.

"It is not so much an issue for online people who are more buyer-oriented," continues Smith. "It is an issue in the bigger agencies where the planning is done where it has always been done."

What this means is that shops with cross-media responsibilities that might include online are in greater need of being able to express that online media component in terms that articulates its contribution comparable to that of the other media under consideration.

"Reach/frequency continues to be important to online advertising as a predictive/planning tool to predetermine the contribution online media could have to an overall marketing effort," says Alan Schanzer, managing partner at The Digital Edge. "Like a CPM, reach/frequency allows us to compare varying types of media with some degree -- or accepted -- level of comfort."

Something to understand about reach/frequency, if you don't already, is that in terms of its use for online, it can allow for the medium's communication delivery to be represented in terms that can be expressed within the context of the overall media package.

There are tools out there that media planners and buyers can use for predictive purposes that enable them to look at what kind of reach an online campaign might be able to accomplish. But these tools aren't yet providing the kind of combined reach and frequency that would let planners and buyers know in what way the communication delivery of a media plan is effected by online's presence. That is being worked on, however.

"Currently, the Digital Edge is in a 'beta' phase with various R&F tools. We are able to use info from Web RF in combination with other media types, which is very useful," says Schanzer. "In general, this is very effective at showing -- at least directionally -- the contribution online could make to an overall campaign. The bottom line is that to the extent we'll still accept reach/frequency in general, it is being accepted as an online measurement tool."

According to Smith -- the industry's resident expert on the topic -- the real reason why reach and frequency matter to online – and this might be true for reach and frequency in all contexts – is in the execution. "Given that you can execute a plan successfully, you want to be able to replicate it," he says. "If the sites vary wildly in execution AND we do not have a good post-analysis tool, you can get a lot of reach one time and a lot of frequency another, etc."

So, the use of reach and frequency for online goes beyond the metric as a predictive measure. It is its ability to quantify the best of all possible media worlds and allow advertisers to yield the same or similar effects repeatedly.

But what online reach and frequency tools one day may be capable of that isn't possible for offline media is monitoring and adjusting media plans while they are live to ensure the post-delivery of the initial communication delivery goal. At the end of the day, what an advertiser really wants is the satisfaction of a communication delivery goal. That is because whatever objective has been set is what a communication delivery goal is based on. The number of impressions, TRPs, inserts, what have you, is all based on what level of communication the campaign has to achieve to accomplish those goals.

How loud do I have to shout my message and how often do I have to shout it in order to move the needle whatever amount I'm being asked to move it?

Online, there is the potential for watching this take place and manipulating your media accordingly to optimize its effects.

"We've got to prove that what we laid out as a goal is achieved (post buy)," says Smith. He says we also need to have the ability to track what is going on while the buy is live so we can adjust and optimize the plan based on R/F goals.

Online's Adoption of R/F Still Coming

Whatever may be said about reach/frequency's importance to media, however, there still seems to be little adoption by the online advertising community. But this isn't necessarily because the metric isn't meaningful.

Relevance is what is questionable; relevance and client demand. Clients might like to have reach and frequency available for their online plans, but they aren't asking for it in ways that make agencies feel any urgency.

Agencies don't "understand the relevance as much as the traditional folks who are planning and allocating their budgets," says Smith. That is due in large part to a lack of pressure from the client.

But it may be due to larger issues.

"Reach/frequency as a standard may be a dying measure," posits Schanzer. "As with the Internet, the conversations around on-demand [and] iTV technology are more about user interaction than users reached. This will continue to trend as digital media formats become more prevalent in the common household. What we are seeing are the standards for offline media being raised to the higher standard of online media." He says this is a bit ironic, seeing as many online practitioners now spend so much time trying to be like general media planners and buyers.

Indeed, as more technology enables advertisers to hold media more accountable by allowing the read on a specific individual's proclivities and engagements with a brand, reach and frequency will come to matter less.

There are sites that survey their users regularly and require registration. There are behavioral marketing platforms that can inform the way ads are delivered. There are technologies that collect audience data from pre-existing sources such as ad servers, content servers and email databases. Being able to merge them with other data sources such as subscription or registration databases to not only extract greater understanding of value of an audience, but also identify that audience as saleable ad inventory, could make discernable interactions from individuals more valuable than reach and frequency.

That said, if we believe the medium CAN actually be used for the purposes of branding, then the only way to carry on the rhetorical discourse that branding in part consists for the purposes of selling is to surrogate the appropriate number of people who must be touched by the message. That surrogate is the communication delivery goal that reach and frequency represent. This will in turn yield some variable of widgets that will be sold. That's essentially why it is used in traditional media, and the same would hold true for online.

Ultimately, the Internet as a marketing tool has to be based in some measure on its ability to use database systems that allow for unique identification of individuals in an audience as prospective consumers. But this view is slow to manifest, at least until a new generation of brand managers and media directors for whom technology is neither scary and for whom data-driven marketing is taken for granted are working together.

Until then, reach and frequency are the best methods at our disposal for determining communication delivery value for a client that would use the medium as a tool for branding and not just to elicit impulse sale.