Roadblocking

Pulled out my trusty media planning text from college to look up a question and managed to learn something new! So I had never heard of a fun media planning strategy called,"roadblocking."

It's pretty simple. When it comes to reach, you can only increase it so much. After achieving a 70% reach, it's gonna be tough to add more b/c there's diminishing returns. You'll start to reach the same people over and over...and that's where you start to increase frequency rather than reach.

So what's a media planner to do? You roadblock! Pick a time slot and day. Let's say 8pm on Monday. Then you simply buy ALL the programs during that hour. Now you've created a roadblock. You've bought 4 or 5 shows (obviously not including cable) and more than likely, you're getting higher reach b/c not all those people could possibly be watching all those shows. So there ya go! Pretty cool, huh?