Lost marketer influence could skew media decisions, including TV buying
News – The Future of TV: Global Series
Marketers are struggling.
That was the blunt assessment from Simon Michaelides, director general at ISBA, when speaking to a broadcaster-centric audience at DTG Summit earlier this month.
He was about to tell them what advertisers need from the TV industry, but first wanted them to understand what is influencing their investment decisions.
He painted a picture of disrupted, expensive supply chains, forcing brands to raise prices and limiting potential sales amid a cost-of-living crisis. Like all organisations, brands are also coping with AI technology disruption.
“There is unprecedented change at the same time as stormy economic waters. We have encountered these in isolation before, but together they create a heady cocktail.”
He noted how advertising is one of the biggest discretionary budget items in most organisations, so it is often first to be cut.
The result? “Marketers are under huge pressure to deliver results. Businesses are saying, ‘If I’m going to spend a marketing pound, I want to be damned sure I will see a result.
“So, marketers are being pushed really hard with flat or shrinking budgets.”
ISBA is the trade body that represents 170 of the UK’s largest advertisers, and Michaelides admitted it was not a rosy picture he was painting.
The budget pressures – and the danger to ad-supported TV and premium video – are compounded by what he described as a dilution of marketing knowledge at brands and a poor understanding at the boardroom level of how marketing really works.
“There is a [marketing] skills gap that is causing huge concern within the industry that we are losing knowledge about the fundamentals of marketing and what good looks like.”
Marketing knowledge dilution
He said this knowledge dilution is seen across media and creative agencies as well.
“Senior marketers are losing influence in the boardroom,” he added. “Lots of companies have kicked that role [e.g. chief marketing officer] off their executive leadership team.
“Sometimes it is folded into another role. Sometimes it goes completely, farmed out across a bunch of fragmented vertical marketing specialisms.”
He warned that if advertisers lose sight of what works in marketing, they could also lose sight of the role TV and premium video play.
He pointed to a growing misunderstanding that the linear path-to-purchase funnel is dead, whereas humans must still be made aware of products, must consider them, then decide to interact and convert, before being reminded to buy again.
“It is true that from a toolkit point of view, not everything has to start with TV and end with search and social. There are many tools playing varied roles. But human behaviour has not changed, fundamentally.”
Michaelides (pictured) believes the role of different media tools and the purchase journey itself have been wrongly conflated, leading some to believe the funnel is dead when it is only compressed, with consumer journeys accelerated.
“Knowledge of that process is being diluted or dying. The [funnel] process is being pushed and pulled by non-marketers who are looking at data that is valid data, but which only provides half the picture, and which unduly influences decisions.”
The push for fast returns, diluted marketing knowledge and a misunderstanding of the funnel is leading to what Michaelides called, “some really binary and extreme decisions in marketing plans.”
False brand vs performance debate
He continued: “We have a false debate that pitches brand marketing versus performance marketing, which has become a proxy for television and video versus online, social and digital.
“That is playing into choices about long-term versus short-term growth. There is a misunderstanding that TV is a long-term thing and everything else delivers short-term.”
He suggested that if someone believes this and reports to the city on a quarterly cycle, they will be tempted to put all their eggs in the short-term basket.
His other concern is creativity, and he explained the structural process that undermines the creative impact of advertising.
It starts with media fragmentation, which saw the world shift from a small number of high-value creatives (like 30-second TV ads) to a high volume of lower-value ones.
“We now need a huge volume of marketing assets, but budgets are smaller or flat. You have to spread those budgets more thinly, across more assets, so you have to dilute quality,” he explained.
“Creativity is a massive driver of effectiveness, and creative quality is being impacted. Ironically, the money that is being spent is increasingly less effective.
“That ripples back to the boardroom, so it turns into a negative circle.”
There was one more challenge on his list: measurement.
He told the London audience: “Measurement is incredibly complex and still highly fragmented.
“There is no single currency for measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of a total campaign, yet this is what the boardroom wants from marketers, so they understand what they are investing.
“Today [cross-media] measurement requires a degree of deduction and correlation across multiple data sources, but that doesn’t wash very well with CFOs.
“They don’t like deduced, correlated, inferred results. They are looking for hard facts.”
If anyone in the audience was waiting for the ‘But never mind, everything will be fine for marketers because…’ moment, they were disappointed.
No magic bullets were revealed.