Posts Tagged ‘Digital’
Ad industry still playing catch-up?
A piece in this week’s Marketing http://tinyurl.com/yb9rc7p talks about how brands are adapting their ad strategy to embrace the internet, as if this is a new development. The piece actually says “there is no doubt that marketing has moved beyond TV ad breaks” and qoutes someone from Saatchi & Saatchi who says “…it is not enough to burst into people’s living rooms through the TV screen”. I actually had to check the date to make sure I hadn’t accidentally found a copy of the mag from 2005.
The piece seems to be stuck in the thinking that an “ad” that gets seen on YouTube is the best way to harness the potential of the web and social media, rolling out the good old T-Mobile Liverpool St station example, hailed as a huge online success (it was in the sense that millions of people watched the ad online, but you’d expect that with the kind of production and media budget thrown at the project, which was designed to drive people online to watch. Interestingly, 17,000 fans on Facebook seems pretty disappointing for a campaign on that scale).
What David Benady didn’t mention once in his article, is the role PR agencies play in helping brands to engage consumers through digital channels. It’s not about sticking an advert online and hoping it “goes viral”. It’s about creating content in the first place that is genuinely interesting, engaging and (preferably) has the potential to generate the media coverage and “talkability” that really spreads the word and get consumers interacting with the brand. I’m not saying ad agencies have no part to play in this, but hopefully brand owners realise that PR people have a natural flair for this, having spent decades having to work much harder to get their stories noticed.
In the same piece, I also learned that the cost per thousand on ITV Player is £30 and on ITV it’s £10. Interesting…nearly as interesting as the fact that almost all of our clilent campaigns come out with a CPT of around £1. Might be worth diverting some of that media spend into other areas??
