TV advertising – a great secondary medium
If we can’t quit advertising on TV, we can at least start thinking of it as something to support ideas that live elsewhere, argues Steve Coll, ECD at Havas Worldwide Australia.
Given the dominance of all things online in our lives, it’s amazing how firmly wedded advertisers are to traditional TV as the lead medium for mass-market campaigns.
Take the recent election campaign as an example.
It’d be hard to find two more motivated advertisers than the Labor and Liberal parties. And, given Obama’s proven success with social media in the US, you’d think both parties would have been keen to exploit those opportunities. Not so.
A whopping 93% of the ALP’s ad spend was on TV. Even still, Tony and friends came out ahead, spending a staggering 97% of their election budget on TV advertising.
As I argued at Mumbrella’s Festival of Branded Content & Entertainment, television may no longer be the drug of the nation. But, contrary to the argument put forward by most content makers, this isn’t the time to quit TV advertising.
However, we can quit thinking about TV in the same old way.
Rather than treating TV as a lead medium, we should be using it to support ideas that live in the newsfeed and news media.
My point of view was heavily influenced by the experience of making the Walker’s ‘Sandwich’ campaign. Walkers invested the bulk of their budget in experiential, content and PR, and ran no more than a six or seven TV spots in support of the news cycle. Even so, Sandwich was the 3rd highest recalled campaign in the UK that month.
And the notion that an idea with inherent newsworthiness and shareability can reduce the need to spend big on TV remains hugely appealing.
A more recent example is ‘Fair Go Bro’ (created in close collaboration with One Green Bean and Starcom). The widely-shared launch film sparked an estimated $3.4million worth of news coverage, sustaining the brand message for a full two weeks without media support. This meant the traditional TV spend could play a supporting role, and focus on more direct conversion messages.
Old Spice regularly uses TV as a support for their phenomenal social campaign. And the recent Cadbury Crème Egg campaign in the UK is a canny combination of Facebook and TV.
Indeed, Facebook and TV might seem like strange bedfellows, but the combination works well here. Mortein’s ‘Kill or Save Louis the Fly’ was a Facebook campaign supported by Earned Media and tactical TV advertising. At the end of the summer 2012, 1 in every 2 Australians could spontaneously recall the campaign, and it had amassed over 300,000 fans with 13 times higher engagement than the All Black’s Facebook page in the week of the Rugby World Cup final.
Clearly, I’m not suggesting every campaign should operate this way. There is no cookie cutter solution to today’s marketing mix.
But there are enough examples to jolt us out of our traditional TV thinking, where a TV execution forms the beginning and end of the story.
At the heart of all the above campaigns is a shareable, newsworthy idea that thrives in the news feed and the news media. And in each case, TV acts as the support medium, sustaining the campaign in the public consciousness beyond the news cycle or expanding it beyond an initial niche base.
Clearly, it’s a potent mix. And by placing less reliance on TV to do the heavy-lifting, the potential added value for marketers in enormous.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Steve, while I strongly agree that TV should take a back seat in most Media campaigns, I disagree that it should be the second seat and not the third one.
In the ever changing media world that we now live in I feel that Outdoor Advertising take a strong second spot for sustaining the campaign in the public consciousness.
One side note, if you extrapolate the current figures regarding TV and the internet as leading entertainment mediums, the internet will out strip TV as the main entertainment medium in 18 months, currently most of the internet viewing is accompanying TV, but as you will agree that will change sooner rather than later.
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TV delivers the highest audiences by far, and will do so for a very long time.
Advertising on social media is fine if what you’re selling or telling is something that your target wants to engage with. If it’s not though, you need an interruption medium like TV.
Social media are terrible as interruption media. Users feel that their space on social media is just that – theirs. They resent intrusions.
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‘TV delivers the highest audiences by far, and will do so for a very long time.’
And those audiences have been dropping since the mid-nineties. Many key target households (20 – 35) don’t even own aerials these days. They have TVs, but only to plug into consoles, PCs, tablets etc to serve as a large screen.
And all of the above ignores the biggest entertainment industry on the planet, namely games.
Imagine what billboard space inside the billion dollar GTAV game-world would be worth? Not that Rockstar would sully their precious icon with anything but spoofs.
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Wow, love the yin and the yang of the comments. Understanding your target audience is key as well as the who, what and why of the business. Love the discussion, questions and ideas, keep em coming.
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Ex-ex
Can you supply a reference for ‘TV audiences dropping since the mid-nineties’?
Because all the data from Nielsen etc shows that TV viewership has actually increased. And that despite on-demand/pay-per-view/delayed viewing, people are actually being exposed to more advertising on TV than they were in “the old days”.
It’s easy in Adland to presume that “the real world” is like our own, where everyone is on Twitter while simultaneously watching pirated episodes of Mad Men.
The reality is simply far from it (at this stage).
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until there is anything that has anywhere near the audience delivery capabilities TV it will always get the biggest slice of the action… laughable to suggest outdoor as a viable secondary medium is laughable as is the obsession with social. Totally agree with Rico and just sayin’
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It seems the difference between:
“An audience that matches the monstrously broad media demographics, though we don’t know if they even watch the ad”
and “an engaged audience that is interested in a relevant and meaningful proposition for their point on the customer journey”
…is lost on many.
It’s 2013, not 1993, kids.
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@AdGrunt, the same criticism has been thrown at TV for years and years – “nobody’s watching the ads”, but the correlation numbers are there – ask P&G, Unilever, L’Oreal, J&J, Reckitt, Telstra… the biggest advertisers in the country. Bigger TV spend = higher awareness, better creative + bigger spend = higher sales.
There are VERY few success case studies that used social media as lead, none with a major brand. Pepsi US tried to ditch TV and focus on social but were forced to admit it was a disaster.
There are very few brand propositions that are ever interesting and relevant enough that a consumer would want them included in their private conversation time. That’s what their social media is and a brand will only be engaged with there if consumers invite it in.
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@Just sayin
I didn’t mention social media. I certainly didn’t mention it as one amorphous channel.
Every single one of the advertisers you mention is spending less on TV and more on, shall we call them digital mediums.
Each also has extensive case studies of using various amounts of digitally-led campaign to greater success than TV alone.
Sorry.
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Ex-ex
Please tell me more about these households who do not have aerials for their new 50 inch LCD TVs? Who n their right mind would purchase a new TV and not be able to access FTV? I must be living under a rock, do people actually have TVs that they can not watch “TV” on?
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@AdGrunt
Digital media can offer very effective support to a TV-led campaign. I don’t dispute that at all. But the article was suggesting digital media should take the lead.
You’ll find that the cases where digital media have been the lead are only in small-scale promotions, not brand-building campaigns with a long time scale.
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@Just saying’
Let me help you scramble into reality, by pointing to the clients you mention:
P&G – to spend 35% of its ad budget online http://on.wsj.com/1feePIi
Unilever – 40% increase in digital ad spend based on, you know, Old Spice for instance. Did you see Isaiah Mustafa on TV?
Shall I go on?
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@AdGrunt
Old Spice belongs to P&G, not Unilever.
As I’ve said, digital media can provide an excellent support to a great TV-led campaign. And Marc Pritchard of P&G agrees:
http://www.broadcastingcable.c.....e_P_G_.php
“Recently, P&G has seen social media take a TV campaign–Old Spice’s “Smell Like a Man”–and multiply its reach. The ads became a viral sensation, drawing millions of online views. The company let consumers send questions via Twitter to spokesman Isaiah Mustafa, who answered in YouTube videos. In addition to generating views, it boosted sales. “We can’t get enough supply, ” Pritchard says. “We’re selling out of Old Spice.”
The bottom line is television still works for P&G, and vice versa. “We continue to innovate with communications and how we make sure that we engage people with our ads, and now we’re renewing our commitment to content that our brands can be associated with,” Pritchard says. “We’ve grown with TV, and we will continue to grow with it.”
With regard to the 35% figure, make sure you understand the context:
http://adage.com/article/digit.....al/243718/ –
“A P&G spokeswoman clarified that Mr. Lafley pegged U.S. digital marketing spending in a range of 25% to 35%, adding that the number includes spending on search, social, online video, mobile and “other costs.
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