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Recency is the simple idea that advertising influences the brand choice of consumers who are in the market for the product. It has been able to transform media planning in a short time, because that's how we think advertising works. For 30 years, planners had assumed that advertising worked by repetition, leaving "tiny footprints on the mind." The process was branded AIDA. Frequency generated awareness, created interest, aroused desire and triggered action. In the 1960s, advertising seemed so effective that public policy debated whether it "makes people buy things they don't need." The issue wasn't deception; it was power.
Today that concern seems quaint. We think of advertising as a relatively weak marketing force among many forces that influence consumers. Its strength is that it can be applied continuously, because it does what it does at a very small cost compared to alternatives like price-promotion or sampling.
We have also gone through a reevaluation of what makes consumers buy. We now appreciate it is the empty cereal box, the broken dishwasher, the expiring car lease, a bad hair day that gets people to make a purchase, not advertising. This makes the timing of the message important. Recency visualizes a window of advertising opportunity in front of each purchase. Advertising's job is to influence the purchase. Media's job is to place the message in that window.
Paralleling this thinking. a wealth of new single-source research from here, the U.K. and Germany shows that when consumers are in the market, one advertising exposure does most of the work. It is not the first exposure but the most recent of a series of exposures (ergo, the name "recency"). It is effective this time because the viewer is in the market.
Using the evidence, recency planning reasons: 1) purchases are made each week; 2) planners don't know who will make them; 3) the goal is to reach as many different consumers as possible in as many different weeks...