Author|Bill Harvey
Source: www.mediavillage.com, June 2022
I’m pausing to ponder the questions I get asked the most nowadays. I know most of my posts are focused on a single question, but in reality a brand has to contemplate all questions at once, because it’s all entangled. We talk about media vs. creative but the audience only sees both as one thing.
1) Should I just try to sell or help the world too?
Be suspect of all binary decision choice set-ups. Not just in marketing but in life. You can do both at the same time. Your brand’s job is to make life better. The job of the creatives is to depict that in a way that rings true — very hard thing to do. Most ads are hyperbolic and try to make that excusable via humor. For years, Chevy Suburban stuck to real people saying what they really felt about the brand and their sales kept going up. Nothing lasts forever, but there’s a lesson there. Ads that uplift and inspire evoke gratitude and long-term memory encoding. Showing diverse people realistically collaborating is a feel good that has not been overdone. But it’s got to center on the real brand as it truly is.
2) They cut my budget and threaten to cut me if I can’t increase growth at the same time.
I know. It’s happening all over. You can do it, you just have to break out of the old calcified ways. In a way you’re lucky that most have been merely paying lip service for so long, it means that if you really plan and activate with the worthy under-used tools and ideas, and don’t just buy everything as cheaply as possible, you can actually move the needle with less money. The biggest effect of those old huge budgets was excessive frequency anyway. If you get creative and media to resonate (www.rmt.solutions) and synergize you won’t need as much frequency. This will be your finest hour.
3) I’m a seller of linear TV. Now that I’m allowed to use any currency I want, should I just use the one that gives me the highest numbers?
Risky. It’s steadily moving to outcomes — not just impression CPM. Examine what is best about your media brand and see if you can make that part even better or if you can assemble more compelling evidence. Also, you can’t think of yourself as a seller of just linear. Linear is one piece of what you sell. The other piece is non-linear, i.e., streaming, addressable, VOD. Give up the word linear. It’s all data driven now — or should be. Break down silos and get all your colleagues to work together to really relaunch your media brand so there are free AVOD and affordable ad-free SVOD versions with some of the best stuff reserved for slightly more upmarket SVOD. Relearn how to acquire viewers by trying new things. Invest in third party research with ARF doing indisputable random control trials to prove your ROI vs. the digital places who self-report ROI (not even including TV in the analysis so all sales created by TV gets credited to digital) and are being drowned in money anyway because their CPMs are lower than yours.
4) Is there a way to make the agency business what it used to be again? Including profitable?
Proven success is the best differentiator. It’s hard to be a proven success when the client doesn’t let you do the things you know to be better. Pitch clients who will let you break out of the check-the-box mold which has smothered the industry for too long. Set up ROI or brand lift bonuses, whichever the client prefers, with impeccable third-party research done perhaps with ARF oversight to judge whether you earned the bonus or not. Explore stronger working collaborations with creative agencies if you are a media agency, and vice versa, to create more integrated full service-like offers.
5) Are there any media types where modest spending brands can be more visible than their larger competitors?
Radio, digital audio, out of home, experiential, brand content, TV news (unless you’re in an old-skewing category).
6) I’ve got a great client whose brand is terrific, but they simply don’t have enough money to spend on advertising. What can we do?
Start in local. Pick the first market wisely. Be a big fish in a small pond and reinvest the returns in a gradual rollout. Or if the brand is DTC and not dependent on having local distribution everywhere, cable network is a steal below the top 16 networks. Putting a number of smaller cable networks together can efficiently get decent reach, easily outreaching digital at equal dollars.
7) Can I successfully put all the client’s money in one media type in order to make sure we break through somewhere?
Dangerous. The more media types the more reach, and the consumer mind automatically assumes that if they notice a brand in more than one media type it’s an up-and-coming brand to pay attention to.
I welcome other questions not addressed above.
Click the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleagues.
The opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author and/or subject(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet, Inc. management or associated writers.
