A new pot of marketing cash for TV
Television has always driven brand awareness, feeding consumers into the top of the famous marketing funnel that is also known as the consumer journey or ‘path to purchase’. According to Irwin Gotlieb, chairman of GroupM Global, this role is completely safe: advertisers who have micro-targeted at the expense of wider audience awareness have seen their market share decline.
Wise marketers know they must not neglect the top of the funnel. Now TV can build on this strength by contributing to the rest of the consumer journey, helping marketers identify and influence brand consideration and product preference – and even driving people towards purchase.
Gotlieb defines television as professionally generated content that is distributed across multiple devices (on-demand as well as linear) and he stresses that we should no longer think of it as a piece of furniture and something that hangs on our wall. He also notes how changes in the last decade mean there is a level of granularity to data that allows marketers in general to define where their audience is at each stage of the marketing funnel.
With these factors in mind, he says: “The biggest opportunity that lays ahead of us, as an industry, is better targeting through addressability, and greater interactivity so that media allows for consumer transactions. I see an advertisement and you execute a transaction – that is where the revenue growth is going to come from.”
Television should seek to operate in every part of the marketing funnel. “We are not substituting the middle or bottom of the funnel for the top. We still need big marketing at the top and that is good news for TV and for media people and marketers in general. But now TV can move from being a simple awareness creator to a medium that creates sales and supports product purchase,” he says.
Gotlieb, who will be speaking at Future TV Advertising Forum at the end of November, predicts that there is a pot of marketing cash that will be moved into television advertising once TV supports the lower funnel activities. He notes that media in general has seen its share of total marketing budget decline, and that trade support today takes the lion’s share of total marketing dollars.
‘Trade’ means the marketing activities of manufacturers and retailers working together directly. Typical examples include price promotion, demonstrations and shelf placement. “If media can target at every stage of the marketing funnel, people will move trade budget into media,” he predicts.
This opportunity could become more exciting if a new breed of retailers, using subscription with delivery, start to weaken the grip that supermarkets and other physical stores have on our wallets.
The U.S. company Parasol is one example: it offers an $85 and $70 per month subscription service for diapers that are not available anywhere else. Amazon Family, meanwhile, provides nappy brands like Pampers and Huggies via subscription and promises to save people a trip to the shop.
For a company focused on a subscription service, shelf space becomes less relevant or irrelevant. “In that context, targeting becomes very important and the role of media changes,” Gotlieb says.
The availability of granular data at census level means marketers can define where their audience is at each level of the marketing funnel today. There is an opportunity for TV (and media generally) to deliver high reach against focused target audience descriptors in each part of the funnel. But there is an important caveat to this happy story and you can hear what it is during our fireside chat with Irwin during the opening session of Future TV Advertising Forum 2016. There he will also tell us (among other things):
– How GroupM (the world’s biggest media investment agency) buys TV audiences, how that is changing, and the extent to which context still matters
– Whether the ad-supported television business model is viable long-term, and what will make it stronger
– The best birthday present the television industry could give him.
Join Irwin at Future TV Advertising Forum
At Future TV Advertising Forum 2016, in London during the first week of December, we are looking at how the industry can achieve a holistic view of consumers across all screens and what truly unified TV/digital campaign management means.
We consider how set-top box inventory can be exposed to buyers programmatically, how standard linear TV buys are being optimised using ‘programmatic’ technologies, and what broadcasters can achieve with a ‘digital-first’ ad-tech strategy. We also take a timely look at the future of live TV sports with advertising.