YOU CAN ALWAYS SAVE money and maximize return on investment in advertising if you refine your target audience and spend money on the lowest hanging fruit – those consumers who represent your best opportunity for driving sales.
However, if brands take money away from broad awareness marketing at the ‘top of the funnel’ to do this, they will fail to replenish that low hanging fruit and their market share will shrink.
This is part of the warning Irwin Gotlieb, Global Chairman at GroupM, will deliver to a discussion at Future TV Advertising Forum Canada next week about the merits of TV and digital, short-term and long-term marketing and broad versus narrow targets. (For the uninitiated, GroupM is the world’s largest media advertising company, overseeing US$102 billion in ad buys, annually. It handles 32% of the world’s media bookings.)
He is a strong advocate of targeting, including via household-level addressable TV advertising, but he confirms: “When clients over-target, they lose market share. We have seen that consistently during the last 15 years.” His advice is to keep spending on broad awareness so that targeting is additional, not substitutional.
Gotlieb has also highlighted the danger that if you get the balance between TV and digital spending wrong, you may not realize it at first. “If people allocate more money to digital at the expense of television, they get short-term returns and don’t recognize that they have created a huge business problem – sometimes until it is too late. In most cases it costs brands more to buy back awareness at the top of the funnel than they saved in the first place.”
Future TV Advertising Forum Canada is being held at a time when the broadcast industry in Canada feels threatened by a pro-digital sentiment among buyers, and some inventory owners complain privately that there is an unjustified bias towards digital in Canada. Gotlieb believes Canada is on a similar trajectory as other markets when it comes to ‘digital vs television’ sentiment, but with a slight time-delay compared to the U.S.
This means issues concerning the integrity of the digital supply chain have not had such an impact on buyer sentiment yet. He does not think Canadian TV has unique problems that will weaken its long-term prospects in the face of increasing digital competition, relative to other markets.
“Growth doesn’t happen by default any more, so it really is time to become innovative.” – Irwin Gotlieb, GroupM
The message is the same for the Canadian television industry as everywhere else: “Decades of consistent growth limited the need for huge levels of innovation. Growth doesn’t happen by default any more, so it really is time to become innovative.
“When I say innovation, this is not simply about technology and data, but innovations in the business structure. The technology for advanced TV has existed for a long time but we need the business practices to support it.”
The GroupM chairman wants a non-adversarial approach to exploiting what he views as a massive opportunity for television, notably to become more addressable. “TV has always been the most effective media vehicle when it comes to branding, and creating broad awareness. We believe it can be similarly effective at every level of the marketing funnel. The objective for advanced TV is that it should operate beyond the top of the funnel.”
He has previously argued that TV can attract new money, including from trade budgets, if marketers can use it to influence consideration rather than ‘just’ awareness, for example. And Gotlieb notes that television is no longer limited to television sets, and includes multiscreen viewing.
In Toronto at next week’s sold out conference, the GroupM chairman will reiterate previous declarations that GroupM will have to start favouring TV inventory owners who provide the company with uncomplicated access to quality addressable inventory. This applies in Canada the same as it does in other major markets like the U.S. and across Europe.
A version of this story previously appeared in Videonet and is reprinted here with permission. If you don’t have a ticket to next week’s conference, Cartt.ca will be there providing coverage.
