TV still king as advertisers struggle with multiple screens
In our new multi-screen world, television remains unseated from its advertising throne – in part because brand marketers are struggling to find the right strategies to reach the new “connected consumer”, industry heard on Wednesday.
Despite a huge shift in consumer behaviour to engage with content on mobile and tablet devices – with digital out-of-home now an additional screen to contend with – advertisers are finding themselves several steps behind a “much faster moving” audience, according to advertisers, media planners and researchers.
When asked if advertisers should have different strategies for different screens at the 2014 Connected Consumer conference this week, SapientNitro’s Michael Bayler said: “Dealing with five screens is a nightmare…we have very little confidence in this space.”
As a result, advertisers and brands are not adapting their strategies well enough to match changing consumer behaviours around technology, according to Martin Ash, research director at Millward Brown. This, he said, is partly because of the strength of TV, and partly because the industry does not “truly understand the motivation behind consumer journeys across multiple screens.”
For the time being, Ash said, “TV remains the biggest single advertising opportunity in the UK.”
The news is potentially frustrating for some advertisers desperate to follow the consumer, no matter what screen they are using, and YuMe’s general manager, Owen Hanks, could be considered one of them.
“How do you get a slow moving oil tanker like the ad industry – unable to move away from TV to new platforms, and follow the much faster moving consumer – to spend money elsewhere?” he asked.
The answer is complicated and unresolved, but Bayler thinks the best route is to approach the market as a “multi-screen ecosystem” where brands, like consumers, must also “become connected”.
“It’s about an ecosystem rather than simply balancing the investments [in different channels],” Bayler said. “[But] not all of the pieces in the new ecosystem should be treated equally, and all of them have different roles to play.”
With total TV advertising revenue in the UK increasing by 3.5% in 2013 to reach a new record high of £4.63 billion, marketers will need to ask deeper questions about how to spend and split their budgets as new screens enter this “ecosystem”.
Carat’s chief strategy officer, Dan Hagen, explained that what the ad industry has been doing for a long time still works, despite the ubiquity of ‘second screens’.
“TV still works and a host of econometric studies show this. It reaches an awful lot of people,” he said. Yet the need for brands to follow consumers to other screens is essential if they are to engage with them in the new spaces they occupy – but doing so comes with warnings.
In 2011, Pepsi saw sales volume for its flagship soft drink fall by -4.8% when it abandoned TV advertising in pursuit of social media marketing on smaller, more personal screens with its ‘Refresh Project’. The move was estimated to have lost Pepsi around $350 million.
Such evidence is driving huge levels of research into what is a rapidly evolving market, with Millward Brown investing heavily; but even with the answers marketers could be left scratching their heads about the best approach.
“What brands don’t know about the connected consumer’s motivations and the reasons they are making the journeys they are is what needs to be resolved,” Ash said. “That’s the gap.”
“When we know that, we’ll know what our strategy needs to be.”
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