Explaining Media Terms in Plain English: Ratings & GRPs
By: Jordan Weil
Tags: TV, Media, Advertising

The lines between creative and media are blurring as media buys are becoming more dependent on the creative work and creative is increasingly being tailored to individual media platforms. Which is why it’s critical for everyone, but especially creative comms planners to have a strong understanding of Media terms. Today, we’ll conquer Ratings and GRPs.

Let me share 2 quick anecdotes about TV ratings with you. (This has a point, I promise)

I’m sure you’ll get a great rating. 50 share, easy.

Have you seen the movie Network? It’s brilliant, dark, funny, came out in 1976, was directed by Sidney Lumet (whose credits include Serpico & 12 Angry Men), and is still surprisingly relevant.

The opening narration discusses HUTs, ratings, and share, and it becomes clear that even if we don’t really know what they are, these are the life & death metrics of TV.

A line that stuck with me was when Howard Beale, our morose anti-hero stated his intention to blow his brains out live on TV and the response was “I’m sure you’ll get a great rating. 50 share, easy.” Check out the scene here:

Know your meme: Media edition

Whenever we hired a new assistant media planner/buyer at a prior agency, someone would invariably send them to the supply closet for a box of GRPs. It was a little funny, a little mean (actually, after the 14th time seeing it, not at all funny) but designed to articulate a point: Media jargon is its own language and you need to pick it up quickly.

As Comms Planners on the creative side, we get painted as not often as strong in media fundamentals as we should be. And it’s so important that we have that foundational knowledge to be able to translate media tactics into comms tasks and ultimately help create famous work.

Defining Ratings & GRPs

Without further ado, here’s the most useful ratings explainer I’ve seen to date. (Added benefit: the explainers are ESPN’s version of muppets)

Two quick notes:

The clip talks about network coverage ratings as a percent of cable network subscribers. We agency folks only care about US ratings which include all TV homes in the country. So it’s Impressions / Total US Universe)

Ratings are aways calculated against a demographic, such as US Households, Adults 18–49, Men 35–54, etc.

Now that you’re an expert on Ratings, lets talk about how Ratings ladder into GRPs.

What’s a GRP? It stands for Gross Ratings Point (and sometimes called a TRP because why use one term when you can use two that mean the same thing). And what it does is it adds all the ratings together for your media schedule. For example let’s say your ad ran in the below shows:

The Bachelorette: 8 Rating (8% of Women 25–54 watched this show)

Survivor (yes it’s still on): 4 Rating

Big Bang Theory: 5 Rating

Shark Tank: 3 Rating

Add all the ratings up to get the cumulative number of ratings points, or Gross Ratings Points. Which means that this schedule delivered 20 GRPs against our audience. Ultimately GRPs are the measure of how many eyeballs your media campaign reached.

Make sense? Good! If you’re at BBDO New York, stop by and I’m happy to chat further; if not, leave a note here.

What about HUTs and Share, you might be asking yourself

You’ll probably never have to worry about these terms as they’re language that buyers and trade publications use; media agency staff rarely use them. But because you asked:

HUTs: Homes using television at a particular time, is expressed as a percent of all TV homes. HUT differs from rating because it combines all viewing, rather than identifying specific program viewing.

Share: The audience of a particular television program or time period expressed as a percent of the population viewing TV at that particular time. Share, then, is a percent allocation of the viewing audience and differs from the rating which is a percent of the potential audience. Share is usually reported on a household basis.

Source: SRDS