Recently, I wrote a piece here on my blog examining how much had really changed in the way consumers make their brand purchase decisions in today’s world. And I concluded that while plenty had changed in the technology dimension of advertising and marketing, consumers still make their brand choice decisions the way they always have.
This time, I would like to look at various types of advertising communication that are required for a brand and how one would make media decisions in order to create the maximum impact with one’s target audience, within budgets, of course. Over the past couple of decades, there has been so much excitement and discussion around digital and social media, that are often called new media. Meaning, of course, that mass media is old hat!
Consumers and advertisers are spoilt for choice. However, I think some of the critical decisions in a brand’s communication are made by those in the advertising and brand communications profession. People who are tasked with thinking of how to make the brand’s strategy distinctive and differentiated, creating the communication itself and also putting it out in media. And because we folks from the old and traditional world of advertising didn’t understand the digital medium when it first arrived, we lost out to digital marketing agencies. We were also left out of the conversations that were taking place directly between technology and social media companies and advertisers (our clients).
The results are there for all to see. Two decades and more of this digital marketing and technology disruption and many have come to realise that it isn’t all the holy grail it promised to be. It is fair to say that perhaps in the US and some other markets in the west, digital is still gaining ground and a large share of advertising budgets go digital’s way, but I would argue that most of it isn’t communication, let alone advertising. If digital marketing is more sales funnel, as I have also been arguing on my blog, and is increasingly becoming a cost-effective distribution channel for companies, then it is more sales and marketing. It is not advertising, brand communications and marketing. Consequently, it stands to reason that more of digital spends ought to be coming out of a company’s sales and marketing budgets, not out of advertising and brand communications budgets.
Returning to what traditional advertising and brand communications do for companies and brands, we in the industry know that they help position brands clearly and distinctively in consumers’ hearts and minds. It is a long journey that customers take with us, from first becoming aware of a brand, to trying it out, buying it repeatedly, and engaging with the brand and the company beyond just a sale. There are broadly six types of advertising communication that we create, and you will find that these are defined more by occasion than anything else.
- Brand/product launch or relaunch campaign
- Follow-up campaign, usually running into the second and third year after launch
- Reminder advertising, that helps to keep a brand top of mind
- Sales promotion
- Brand image promotion
- Event sponsorships
One could add the seventh category of tactical advertising which doesn’t belong to any of the above types, but the last four of the above six types are already a form of tactical advertising. And by tactical advertising, I mean occasion-specific brand communication that might not be thematic, but nevertheless is an important part of the brand’s overall communication strategy and must conform to it.
These categories are all very good for brands that have large advertising budgets; given a full needs-based budget, one would always recommend the entire gamut of advertising activities and media channels. However, it is not always possible to promote every brand with large budgets and this is where one has to make strategic and wise choices. This is also where corporate brands can play a role in bridging the gaps. For example, in the third and fourth year after Seagram’s (now Pernod Ricard) launch in India, the company launched Passport Scotch Whisky and Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin with limited budgets. Both were targeted at a younger consumer profile, and because one had the benefit of discussions with media colleagues within Ogilvy Delhi, we could decide that the best choice would be to focus on where our young, urban metro audience are likely to be most. For the gin brand, I remember Channel V had just launched in India then, attracting large numbers of viewers and Seagram agreed with the agency decision to advertise heavily on it.
I tried creating a grid of advertising occasions and media channels to see what if anything could have changed in media decisions for various types of advertising, which I shared on LinkedIn and Twitter. Media channels have certainly exploded in the past two decades both in traditional media and in digital media giving advertisers several choices – a problem of plenty. However, consumer’s consumption of media has also got fragmented in the meantime, making the decision of specific media channels extremely hard for media folks and for advertisers. That said, media decisions would still be guided most by what the particular type of advertising and message demands and to that extent wouldn’t have altered very much.
What ought to have changed hugely is digital media and advertising, since it claims to have so much new and useful data on customers. In my grid exercise, I was struck by how much the last row – digital – actually resembled a direct marketing campaign. The advertising occasions or messages became stages in a direct marketing exercise and you can see how, when I pull the last row out, on to a separate page. There, you have it: digital as direct marketing. Something I have been saying all along.
However, since digital has meanwhile gone the sales funnel and e-commerce route, I tried to see if digital media and communications could actually deliver both. After all, even direct marketing has an ultimate goal of converting respondents into customers cost-effectively, while at the same time building relationships with them. I discovered that it is actually possible to integrate the direct marketing/brand-building efforts with sales using digital, with certain conditions, which you can view in the third page of the document above.
The thing to remember is this: every digital advert is a lead-generation exercise. This being the starting point, the sales funnel leads the person to the website and ends in a sale. The direct marketing effort will be asking the respondent if they would like to continue to hear from the company, and those respondents who did not make a sale would receive the reminder advertising/email message. The converted customer ought to be added to the company’s customer database anyway and would receive other communication messages from them, be it sales offers, what’s new in stores, invites to exclusive events etc. From the diagrammatic representation of how both can work together, we can see that the sales funnel is now another step in the direct marketing and advertising journey, which is an ideal situation for any brand or company to be in.
What it needs is for tech companies and their smart algos and AI-based customer and sales tools to make it work effectively. Crucial are how they can avoid duplication of messages to the same respondent, how non-respondents are communicated with, and how converted customers are treated. And they must find a way to do this without any cookies! Databases and how they are managed in the communication process ought to become more intelligent and discreet and also less intrusive.
I am quite new to the digital medium and since I have also been out of the advertising industry for almost two decades, I have had plenty to catch up on and learn. Thanks to small freelance assignments from former Ogilvy colleagues and some other friends years ago, I have managed to gain some understanding of the medium, how it works, what are its shortfalls, etc. I am not sure if adverts in the streaming or OTT channels are interactive and lead you to companies’ websites or whether they are like videos on YouTube, meant only for passive viewing. Here I must say that YouTube featuring adverts that don’t allow you to skip them, is a scam that must be stopped. It goes against everything that the digital medium is supposed to stand for: customized media for the individual viewer/reader that he or she has control over, not some media or tech company somewhere.
These are ways in which digital can make itself more relevant and meaningful in marketers’ and advertising plans, helping companies build their brands and increase engagement with customers, while also making sales. Then too, advertising for brands can never ever leave out the real surround-scape impact of television and its new avatar, streaming. Print too has its role clearly cut out, which is in creating news value and imparting information, which many product categories need even today.
Media proliferation and fragmentation are the order of the day. Within this crazy whirl, the question is how to bring more order to media decisions for brands, based on the various kinds of advertising required from time to time. And how to help client organisations make sense of it all, be it in brand sales, market share or brand valuations. All three are linked in my mind, through the most valuable asset brands can ever claim to have: connections with their customers.
Peripatetic Perch 