Sean Cunningham is President & CEO, Video Advertising Bureau (VAB), the foremost industry source for video research and thought leadership.
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I had to leave the country to get a great lesson on how to best mix media levers for maximum advertiser results. The lesson was to have “no memory” of what the top media levers “used to be” and exploit only what levers are available right now and for the duration of the ad campaigns. With this article, you won’t need to gain a work visa to learn your own great lesson.
During the agency half of my career, I was sent to Canada to open a new full-service media agency. What I thought was my biggest handicap (lots of media expertise, no media knowledge of the new country) turned out to be one of my new agency’s biggest assets. I had the most current objectivity of the media levers and their right-now selling/scale abilities, and I quickly got current with Google, TV, Facebook, print, radio, etc. All the while, I was forgetting the “yeah, but …” context (read: bias and baggage) of what those levers “used to be.”
The results? First-year investing in a new-to-us country’s media helped all our new-to-us advertisers hit or surpass all their sales and brand goals. We were myopically focused on what media levers could do “right now” and for campaign duration, while dismissing their yesterdays of bigger/smaller and/or better/worse. It has become clear from our frequent interactions with agencies and advertisers that if there ever was a year and country that needed advertisers and agencies to make media choices with the most-current objectivity while forgetting what the top media levers used to be, it is 2023 in the U.S.
This need as well as the desire to forget is clear from the rate and pace of marketer downloads of our latest white paper entitled “What is TV? The modern consumer’s definition of TV.” The industry facts and figures also uphold the idea that many leave behind their bias and baggage to advertise on TV.
Today’s most actionable definition of “TV” calls on the reader to rid their objectivity of their first associations with the term as they typically begin and revolve around live primetime episodic shows refreshed weekly and delivered via a 46” screen bolted to the wall with “declining” as its context.
Why “forget” this first impulse? Because it skips over about 80% of the facts of what TV actually is in 2023. The marketer’s 2023 today definition of TV is: “Professionally-produced, long-form content ( i.e., longer than 20 minutes) with high emotional engagement found in a brand-safe environment regardless of platform or device.”
At a minimum, this definition includes eight premium platforms and four types of conduits (linear, CTV/streaming, OTT, digital video, mobile, OOH, VOD, OTA, etc.) as TV’s accurate first association, with emotional connectivity as today’s co-first association.
What else should advertisers and agencies “forget” about 2023 TV? The idea that it’s an upper-funnel media lever that drives brand awareness and consideration and the lower-funnel tasks of intent and sales are best accomplished through “transactional” (last click) media, which leaves limited space for TV to function as a convert-to-sales lever. Fresh 2023 marketer eyes, purposely forgetting the contextual “funnel” roles (bias and baggage) will take advantage of the most-current understanding of multiscreen TV to drive full-funnel business outcomes with equal emphasis on sales/conversions as awareness/intent.
Our late March-issued “25 Ways TV Grows Brands” condenses 10 years of original attribution research (23 reports analyzing: 1,000 brands/80 categories/30 metric types) into one definitive 2023 report.
All 25 “ways” are tracked through their place on the purchase funnel, with terrific TV credentials and usage in many lower-funnel “conversion” tasks (customer acquisition, launching new products, stimulating capital investment, long-term sales, etc.) that will make growth-obligated marketers happy to forget what they thought they knew about 2023 “TV.”
Of the report’s 25 ways that TV grows brands, one that stood out was its powerful ability to drive consumers to a brand’s digital storefront. Across 36 DTC brands analyzed, there was, across the board following their campaign launches, a surge of new customers to their online storefronts, with continued lifts through their respective campaigns. Further, the report also sheds light on the extent to which TV advertising is a potent catalyst for short-term revenue growth, particularly during the launch year of a brand’s first TV campaign. A key takeaway for marketers: Not only is TV a brand builder, but it is also profoundly effective at making an immediate impact.
I dare you to grow the easy way—forget your installed first media thoughts, get objectively current on the big media levers ASAP, and save yourself the need for a work visa to get the best “new” perspective on growing product sales and your brand.
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