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There's a new kid on the block! (but don't just dump the old one)
Online and offline: getting the balance right
Time was, as recently as five years ago, that it was easy to find people on both sides of the agency/ client relationship who were reluctant to commit to any significant spend on online marketing. Digital marketing was unproven, it was peripheral, it was going to blow over, the technology was unreliable. For which in most cases, of course, you could read ‘I don’t really understand it/know anything about it’.
How times change. Listen to any marketer as we approach the 2nd decade of the new millennium, and you will be left in no doubt that digital marketing is all the rage.
And with good reason. The world of online marketing is where it’s all happening. New technologies and new channels appear almost daily. They’re dynamic, they’re fun, they’re funky. They happen on a brightly lit and coloured screen, and can animate and intrigue and engage. They offer a way to really interact, on a one to one basis, and build a dialogue that no other medium can. They’ve become ‘fashionable’ to the point that any new initiative attracts an immediate and short lived adoration way beyond its longer term value: witness how we have moved from hyperventilating over blogging, to SMS, to Facebook, to Twitter.
No wonder online advertising spend has finally overtaken that for conventional television advertising. And it’s all so cheap, relatively! In fact, in the light of all the above, why would anybody seriously consider using all that old fashioned offline media at all?!...
Recognise it? It’s an argument we’re starting to hear all the time. It’s an argument that’s very seductive to anyone; and especially to those who are uncomfortably and maybe secretly aware that their marketing budget is not really adequate for the task at hand.
Unfortunately, it’s not an argument that’s supported by the available research. Bluntly: the evidence suggests overwhelmingly that use of online media alone is unlikely to build a successful brand. Specifically, online media in exclusion will not build the levels of awareness and coverage which most brands require. It won’t offer the ubiquitous presence that broadcast media can offer. It is unlikely, on its own, to make your brand ‘famous’.
None of which is to say, of course, that online has anything other than a massively important role to play in any modern brand communications plan: it can do, brilliantly, all the things it claims. But it’s important that we recognise its real role in the communications and media mix – and understand that, disappointingly perhaps, it is not a ‘cheaper way of doing the same job’.
Nielsen have recently conducted a major study to explore whether, in this new internet-enlightened age, the ‘old rules’ of share of voice (SOV) still apply. They wanted to know whether the ‘new rules’ of digital communications mean that brand success is no longer so dependent on weight of spend.
Nielsen looked at 123 brands across 30 diverse categories: leaders, challengers and niche brands, new brands, old brands, middle age brands. These brands had widely varying ratios in their offline to online marketing spends.
Nielsen then brought together media spend and sales data, and established ‘base sales’ by stripping out the effects of distribution changes, in-store promotions, etc etc.
Their unambiguous conclusion is that share of voice is still the key driver of share of market – in the digital age as in the (historical) analogue one. They even constructed a model to predict share growth – based exclusively on the relationship between ‘Excess Share of Voice’ and actual brand success – which should be a must read for any brand owner setting his or her marketing budgets.
Sackfuls of other data, however, confirms what should be obvious to us all: that online marketing’s real strength, as a well planned and cohesive element in an integrated communications plan, is how it can add dramatically to the power and cost effectiveness of the whole campaign.
Research by OMD and others have demonstrated that the application of online marketing to a previously offline campaign can improve ROI by up to 85%. Other work, collated by MSN, suggests that online media will boost the effectiveness of all key metrics (awareness, propensity to purchase, etc) by an average of around 20%, while other work by the IAB suggests that the synergistic effect of online and offline media results in marketing effectiveness levels way beyond the proportionate incremental spend of either.
And the list goes on.
So let’s continue to celebrate the arrival of ever more exciting online marketing platforms and channels – but not let them eclipse our perceptions of television and cinema, posters and press, radio and direct marketing to the point that we forget the relative value of the latter and the mutual interdependence of both.
Sources:
Nielsen: ‘Budgeting for Growth’
MSN: ‘Online Advertising Effectiveness’
IAB & ThinkBox: ‘TV & Online: Better Together’
IAB: ‘The Dove Study: Explaining the Process of Cross-Media Optimisation’
Mike Rayner, Strategy Partner, Cogent Elliott