Brand marketers ‘should move from multichannel to omnichannel’
Advertising campaigns have not kept up with the way consumers use media, according to Sara Picazo, The Trade Desk’s EMEA research and insights director.
The average person bounces between five different forms of media throughout an average day.
Picazo explains to Mumbrella that multi-channel marketing strategies, where media is purchased across multiple disconnected channels, no longer have the catch-all effect they once did.
In fact, according to The Trade Desk’s first-ever neurological research in Australia, advertising campaigns without cross-channel integration can lead to a 90% surge in ad fatigue, as the same campaigns are served multiple times to the same consumer without any thought of how the message is being received.
The research shows that ‘moment’, ‘mindset’, and ‘media context’ (more on these later) are the three key drivers that influence consumer engagement – more than geo- or demographic targeting.
Picazo says this research shows brands need to urgently re-think how ad campaigns are planned and bought – and central to this is mounting an effective omnichannel strategy.
Sara Picazo
Differentiating between ‘multi-channel’ and ‘omnichannel’ strategies may seem like splitting hairs to the uninitiated, but Picazo insists the two seem similar on paper, but are worlds apart in effectiveness.
“Almost every company on the planet will have a multichannel approach,” she says. Even start-ups with thousand-dollar advertising budgets will usually spread it across social media and search ads, she says. So, what’s the difference?
“With omnichannel, you’re [also] advertising on several channels, but you’re using data and technology to connect them, so that you can run a campaign holistically across them.
“That might mean that you are managing frequency across channels. It might mean that you are retargeting from one channel to another so you can have a bit more control over where you’re exposing people across channels, as opposed to just in that one silo. Or it could even just be having visibility on all your channels in one place and how they’re performing.
“But, it’s this idea of connecting channels which is key in an omnichannel strategy, as opposed to a disconnected multichannel approach.”
For The Trade Desk’s research study, The Untapped Opportunity of Omnichannel, the company teamed with Brainsights to collect 63 hours of brain activity — encompassing nearly 800 million brainwave data points — from 42 Australians. Picazo said the research is “quite interesting and quite complicated.”
Simply put, the team strapped electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets to participants in order to track neurological responses to both omnichannel and multi-channel campaigns, each running across broadcast video-on-demand, audio, display, online video, and digital out-of-home.
The aim was to assess the mental impact on attention, memory encoding, connection, immersion, persuasiveness, and fatigue. Aside from this brain activity, the headsets also attach to the ear, so that other bodily reactions can be measured.
“We look at what different parts of the brain are lighting up, and that is indicating whether something is being stored in your long term memory, whether it’s more of an emotional connection that you’re creating, and so forth,” Picazo explains.
In addition, the process is filmed so that what is being viewed corresponds and correlates with the changes in brain activity, allowing for a delay time of roughly 1.5 milliseconds.
The research found that omnichannel campaigns were 70% more memorable, 50% more persuasive, 50% better at building consumer connection, and 40% more attention-grabbing.
Picazo said the most surprising finding for her was “when people are overexposed on display, for example, then their TV ad for the brand worked less well. You can’t think of your channels individually – because if you are, for example, putting all of your effort into a brilliant TV campaign – if you overexpose on another channel, like display, then you’re indirectly impacting your other ‘main’ channel. The degree of interconnectedness quite surprised me. I didn’t think, necessarily, that we would see such an impact from channel to channel with how connected they are.”
Picazo explains that The Trade Desk is constantly asked for research on Gen Z as a targetable cohort, which misses the crux of how people interact with media these days. “It’s useful to instead know more about audience media demands: Why they go to media, how they make the choices that they do in the moments that they do. So we went down this rabbit hole of trying to understand audiences at that deeper level.”
Mindset, moments, and media context were the three trigger points when measuring engagement — or lack thereof — of an advertising strategy.
Mindset, or ‘mood’, is about understanding “the emotional and rational reasons that people come to media,” Picazo says. “So, it could be anything from a boredom fix, to wanting to relax, to needing a quick answer – it can be all sorts of things.”
“Then there’s the moment itself that matters, because the moment really dictates what media choice you’ve got available to you. It’s important who you’re with. It’s important what you’re doing.” Picazo uses the example of one person commuting on the tube (she is based in London) and another driving to work.
“We’re doing the same activity, technically, but we have very different media choices at our fingertips. Hopefully you’re not on your phone whilst you drive, but I will probably be on my phone on the tube – so you can see how that moment influences it.
“And the last variable is what actual media choices do people make, in that mindset, in that moment? It’s less of a customer segmentation, as we’re used to doing in marketing where we say, ‘he loves music, he’s very sociable’, then we put you in that bucket and you live alongside all the sociable creatives.
“That just doesn’t work with media anymore, because there are so many different combinations of how you could consume media, that you’d end up with so many groups of very niche people and how they go on their media journeys.
“So we flipped it on its head and we said, ‘Okay, how can we understand experiences that people want to have with media?’ And we tracked how they move through those, instead of them being first classified in a bucket based on age or interests.”
As Picazo said, the research is quite interesting and quite complicated. And, short of strapping headsets onto every potential customer, there are a few actionable takeaways she recommends to marketers hoping to make use of this research.
“If you’re multichannel now and you want to move more towards omnichannel, you need to be set up in a way that allows those connections between channels,” she says. This may involve using third-party experts in areas you aren’t well versed in. “Thinking about how you bring this execution together is important because that’s where you can really connect channels in a practical way.”
The second recommendation is making sure your technology isn’t siloed. “If you want to connect those channels, you need to be working with identifiers that work across channels. Some of them don’t. Some of them work only within Google’s ecosystem or they work only within specific ecosystems.”
The last piece of advice is test and learn. It seems simple, but Picazo says she relates to the urge to run before learning to walk when it comes to implementing new marketing approaches. “I understand the ‘let’s run a campaign with every single channel and really target everyone’ approach — that might be the destination you want to reach, but it might be an idea to test and learn, first.
“For example, run digital out-of-home connected with audio first — which we’ve found work very well together — run this test, see what you learn from that, and then take that into another iteration. Think about what KPIs you have, what audience you’re trying to reach, and go step by step, test and learn, and take those learnings with you.”
At the end of the day, marketing dollars are shrinking, which is what prompted The Trade Desk to run this omnichannel research in the first place.
“We kept hearing from partners we work with about having to do more with less. They’re encountering these tightening budgets, tightening resources.
“If we can glean efficiencies and improve performance through connecting channels, I think it makes sense to do so. That’s what set us on this journey.”
After all, to misquote Woody Allen, the brain wants what the brain wants.
Read the Trade Desk’s report here.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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