Short Answer

 

Your base TV plan alone got you some reach, with a given frequency.  When you add more, you increased frequency within that group that was exposed to the original plan.

 

But you also added new reach from people previously unexposed, and within that group the frequency is likely lower (if the oomph of those added daypart was less than what you invested in the original plan).  So, a small improvement in frequency for one group, plus a new group with low frequency, nets out as a lower overall frequency.

 

 

Understanding Frequency

 

When it's said that a plan has a reach of 50 and a frequency of 3, we understand that the average number of times a person sees our commercial is 3.

 

Well, that's not quite the complete story.  A more precise definition of frequency is that it is the average number of times our commercial is seen, calculated across the people who have seen it at all.

 

Suppose you put 3 commercials on channel 66 in Chicago at 3:01 am, 3:12 am and 3:17 am, and they reach (miraculously enough) precisely four people, Melissa who saw all 3, Jacob who saw just 1, and Bob and Karen who each saw 2 of the airings.

 

So, our reach is 4 people, and their average frequency is 2 ([3+1+2+2]/4).  Makes sense?

 

OK, we're in agreement that the frequency = 2.

 

But what about the entire rest of Chicago, who were either sound asleep, doing something else, or watching a different channel?  All those millions?  Ah, they don't count at all when calculating frequency, since they were never reached in the first place.

 

 

Trivial Pursuit

 

Let's distill this down to this media trivia question:

 

A schedule is placed against a target of Total Women. The plan produces a 60 reach and a 3 frequency. Does this mean that the average woman sees the ad:

 

 

The correct but surprising answer is "less than 3 times"! The 60% of women who were reached saw your ad an average of 3 times.  But the other 40% of women saw your ad zero times.  So the "average woman" sees the ad (60x3 + 40x0)/100 = 1.8 times!

 

 

So, what does this have to do with YOUR plan?

 

We are now ready (whew, finally!) to look at your plansheet.

 

Here's what you have:

 

 

So, with the original plan we got that 7.6 freq, and that's against 52.6 of the target.  The added dayparts have less heft, with only a frequency of 4.4. It is true that the addition will boost the exposure of some (N.B.!) of the folks reached by the base plan, since they've now been exposed to both parts of the plan.  But a big consideration is that we're adding a lot of folks to the reach, people who would miss the original plan and now have seen only the added dayparts, and we know that the frequency there was lower.  The result:  overall frequency has dropped.

 

 

One More Important Thing

 

Please note that none of this has anything to do with TView or the way it calculates stuff.  These quirks of media frequency are just a part of normal media, though not always well understood.