Texas Media Markets

by: colin

Sat Feb 16, 2008 at 06:48 PM CST

As the Early Voting period begins and the presidential campaigns begin to ramp up their media buys for the Primary Election, I thought it might be helpful to provide a little information about the Texas media markets.

A "Media Market" is the delineation between where one station's coverage area ends, and another station's coverage area begins.

Cable markets are totally different and will be broken down in another journal later.

Putting everything into one journal would be pretty daunting, but I am able to lay out some basic information and I'm sure that there are a lot of folks in the BOR community that would happily try to answer lingering questions.

First things first: there are 20 Media Markets in Texas.

Special thanks to nbeaudrot helped out with a great link to a map: http://ekb.dbstalk.com/TVMarke...

There's more below the fold!

Abilene-Sweetwater
Amarillo
Austin
Beaumont-Port Arthur
Corpus Christi
Dallas-Ft. Worth
El Paso (Las Cruces)
Harlingen-Weslaco-Brownsville-McAllen
Houston
Laredo
Lubbock
Odessa-Midland
San Angelo
San Antonio
Sherman-Ada
Shreveport
Tyler-Longview
Victoria
Waco-Temple-Bryan
Wichita Falls & Lawton

If you want to know which counties are in each market, I'd be happy to post those as requested.

As you'll see below if you're not seeing the Clinton and Obama spots on your local station...there may be a reason...

Texas Media Markets
Ranked by % of Texas' Television Households
HH data based on 2006 Estimates, Voter Data based on 2004 Democratic Primary for RRC

Until I figure out embedding, you can view the chart here:

http://sheet.zoho.com/public.d...

HH=Household
ADI=Area of Dominant Influence
CPP= Cost Per Point for 35+ Demographic

Clearly you can see that, contrary to many national media personalities, you don't have to buy every market to reach effectiveness in media buying.

Most often when discussing media buys you will hear much talk about "Cost Per Point".

In short, Cost Per Point (CPP) is derived through a formula where the cost of the advertising buy is related to the "Gross Rating Points" or grips--the "ratings" we so often hear about regarding television programming that measure how many people are watching a show.

You can refer to it as the dollar cost of each 1 percent of your targeted viewing audience.  The simplest way to understand it is to assume that 100 points creates a viewing frequency of 1 (on average).  So if you have $50,000 to go on the air in Corpus Christi you'll get 1,000 Points...which means the average viewer will see your ad 10 times. 1,000 points is usually the threshold you need to be at to ensure message penetration.  Of course the ad's content and character effect message penetration as well.

CPP is a simple way to try and predict, in a quantifiable way) the efficiency of your media buy: "How many times will people see my spot?". As always, people who live in front of a television are likely to see the ad far more than someone who doesn't watch television. But CPP is an easy way to predict average frequency among viewers.

All of the data above is used by media consultants to make your "buy"--the actual exchange of your money for their airtime.

Contrary to my posts, I'm not perfect or infallible.  If anyone finds errors/ommissions, please feel free to let me know.  As questions arise, I hope everyone feels free to jump in and help provide the clearest, most accurate information possible.