- Steve Miller

MTV is offering advertisers a jazzy new way to quantify their media spends.

The cable net has contracted with Marketing Evolution, El Dorado Hills, Calif., to offer a system based on meeting benchmarks including awareness, relevancy, new purchase intent, purchase loyalty and advocacy. Advertisers may still pay on a CPM basis, but also have the option to contract with Marketing Evolution to measure the success of their buys.

"We are creating a made-to-order tool for marketers," said Todd Cunningham, svp-strategy and planning at MTV Networks, New York. He said the effort is an extension of "transference"—the concept that advertisers transfer consumer awareness from the media brands where  they place their messages—a practice that the network holds in high regard.

The new initiative does not follow any single platform, so that it's "platform neutral," said Carolyn Everson, MTV's evp-strategy and operations, U.S. ad sales.

"We do for a large part go to market with a 'here are our brands and this is how we connect' sort of attitude," Everson said. She added that the plan will not be used by all of MTVN's clients because "there will continue to be plenty of media buys that are based on frequency goals. This tool will take the clients that want to fit collaboratively and understand how we are using the various platforms."


The pitch comes as the network has struggled with its youth-skewing brands, including MTV and VH1, which, while drawing close to a million viewers a night, suffer from a loss of 10% of that viewership during breaks, in the case of VH1, per the company.

And the MTV channel's emotional attachment is relatively low with a rating of 0.36, per Nielsen Media Research, below networks including Spike, Discovery and Sci Fi.

"What we are trying to do here is address the nature of the habits of younger viewers and consumers," said Rex Briggs, CEO at Marketing Evolution. "CPM is kind of a dinosaur in this new program. We want to measure the true impact. CPM has always been pretty irrelevant. This can show true cost for return."

Bob Jeffrey, global CEO at JWT, New York, said the move makes sense: "It's not a surprise that MTV would do something like this, and that they are aggressively going to a client with those marketing platforms to demonstrate what it can do in an ROI kind of way. This is where the world is going . . . there is more marketing pressure to be more surgical, more precise."

MTVN could set an example for others and its new concept is a direction that other large media companies need to explore, said Chris Vollmer, partner at Booz & Company, New York.

"Media companies sit on top of so much information [on] what resonates with the consumer," Vollmer said. "They are creating and aggregating audiences every day, and they are in a better position to help marketers."