Have your TV advertising cake and eat it
Sky IQ’s Emma Holden explains why there is no need to choose between long-term communications and short-term wins when it comes to television advertising.
Debate around the merits of long-term brand building versus short-term customer acquisition continues to rumble on in TV advertising circles. It reared its head again at last week’s MediaTel event, with conflicting views between panellists and the audience on which approach brands should be focusing on.
Some were concerned by the perceived detriment of taking a short-term view – but is this caution justified? Why can’t we benefit from both approaches, depending on the circumstances?
TV advertising has always been about winning the hearts and mind of consumers. Not only do advertisers want to create emotional connections – viewers respond warmly too. At times of national unity and celebration like Christmas, the Olympics, or the World Cup, many of the accompanying ad campaigns are enjoyed as integral aspects of the public’s experience, and remain embedded in our collective memories.
That’s what is great about TV advertising. It allows you to build a brand on a long-term basis. It allows you to weave a story, to engage with your audience, and to create a bond with them. That’s why we can all recall a favourite TV ad from childhood, such as Beanz Meanz Heinz for me.
New technology and customer insight doesn’t just give short-term insight; complete data-sets can help us to understand how to create and build long-term brand performance.”
But as well as brand building, TV advertising sells products. And now with new technology, and unprecedented levels of customer insight available, brands are able to create campaigns in a much more targeted way for short-term gain. They can also track and prove the effectiveness of such activity.
“Hurrah!” shouted some camps; we can now be as granular as online and show that our budgets are fully justified. But others raised fears that advertisers might go too far down the road of digital marketing, focusing excessively on each and every click and metric at the expense of long term brand value.
But I think these fears are doing our industry a disservice. TV is a very powerful and effective medium; this is well-documented, and it explains commercial TV’s ongoing success. Television is a broad church, and it is commercially effective in multiple ways.
Huge blockbuster ads in the run-up to Christmas and across the Super Bowl over the weekend are part of the overall fabric or vocabulary of television. They enhance the contemporary, ‘happening now’ feeling of broadcast, but that is not to forget the long term effectiveness of TV. Quite the opposite, in fact.
New technology and customer insight doesn’t just give short-term insight; complete data-sets can help us to understand how to create and build long-term brand performance. It can enable agencies and brands to make informed decisions for both the immediate future and beyond.
As one contributor pointed out on the day: “The more you define an audience, the more effective your communications should be.”
TV advertising campaigns should remain aspirational, brand building and story-telling in the long-term. However, the brands that succeed will be the ones that employ newly available data to improve their short-term campaigns that will, in the long-term, build a brighter brand than ever before.
See also:
Video: How data is shaping TV advertising
Is second screening damaging the smart TV market?
How TV advertising should really be using social media
Is industry ready for multi-platform audience measurement?