Maximise your TV advertising campaign success in the age of disruption

Having worked in the media agency world for the better part of a decade, I have come to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of different media channels and platforms. My primary role was to give my clients an objective understanding of the most efficient way to spend their media budgets. Admittedly, in many of those conversations, their minds were already made up – that is, they had already been “guided” by their global leads on how to allocate their budgets. In some extreme cases, there were even “digital targets” on how much share of spend “needed” to be allocated to certain digital platforms.

Now, I’ve tried to build my reputation on being able to offer, as far as possible, an objective, evidence-based view when it comes to media strategy and planning. In many of those situations, despite my attempts, I’ve struggled to convince clients of the importance of “doing TV properly” when it comes to their media mix.

With this in mind, I’ve assembled some proof points for TV, as well as some load shedding-proof tactics to outsmart our existing pandemic for your next TV campaign.

oints for tV

Reach is critical to campaign success, and all research proves this. TV is still the dominant or primary driver of reach when it comes to media platforms. The only comparable media type in excess of 90% reach would be that of mobile phones. The average campaign reach of a TV plan is highest when compared to other media platforms (with the

Granted, not all reach is equal. Some reach is worse than others because: The creative didn’t work, but it accounts for more than 50% of ad effectiveness.

Your brand wasn’t recognisable; in other words too small or too late in the ad sequence.

(iii) Ads weren’t viewable. Conservative estimates reveal an average of 30% of ads you buy on digital won’t be viewable. Based on the above, (DS)tv reach is, by far, betterquality reach. In addition, DStv also ensures this quality reach via digital offerings in terms of DStv App, DStv

Catch-up and so forth. The entire DStv ecosystem is a safe bet when compared to other platforms.

The number-one media touchpoint in terms of “average impact on brand strength” is TV – almost twice that of its nearest competitor, social media. Furthermore, out of all media channels, TV is ranked as the second-best channel when it comes to being seen as a trustworthy advertising platform.

In 2019, GroupM conducted an econometric study called Demand Generation, the largest of its kind. The study aimed to determine the optimal media mix when it comes to delivering the best ROI for advertisers. The analysis looked at a variety of variables including 50 brands, 14 categories, R31.2 billion of advertising spend and 11 media channels across 10 different KPIs (such as sales uplift, ROI and so forth). South African data was also included in this study, but for the most part, the findings did skew towards more developed markets, where digital maturity is much higher. The study is publicly available, and the evidence is clear.

TV measured the strongest when it came to some vital campaign success metrics, including:

(i) Share of short-term and long-term media-driven sales was highest.

(ii) The variability of returns was most stable for broadcast VOD and generic TV advertising.

(iii) TV boosted the efficiency of other media channels both in terms of scale and consistency over time. This is referred to as the “media synergy effects by channel”. In other words, TV gave all other media channels the biggest “boost” in advertising effect.

(iv) Across all categories included in the study, including FMCG, finance, automotive, retail and so forth, the model optimised the media mix to give the best ROI for each campaign and TV was given the largest share of media spend.

(v) Interestingly, even for advertisers with the proportion of their online sales exceeding 50%, the optimised media deployment model allocated 48% of media spend to TV!

Don’t look only at your short-term revenue curves. If you don’t understand diminishing returns, then conversion metrics quickly become “the tail wagging the dog”, and you’ll miss out on building bigger revenues over longer periods of time.

How to outsmart load sHedding for your next tV campaign

Please keep in mind that while some of the elements for good TV planning are “hygiene”, there’s no harm in reminding ourselves of what “good” looks like:

• The most important element, based on many research studies, is to double check your creative. If you get that wrong, nothing else in your media plan is going to work.

• Check how much you are investing. Every campaign is a reach curve. The higher the curve, the more sales you’ll earn. For the most part, campaigns don’t attain good reach because:

(i) they stop too soon;

(ii) all spots are invested in a short duration of time in the same time bands;

(iii) or there isn’t enough to bring the reach curve reach close to its peak, in other words [(reach x frequency) x length of campaign].

• Load shedding robs viewers of (on average) two hours per day of prime time viewing, so you have to extend your campaigns to run for longer because load shedding shifts and changes in terms of the areas that lose power and the times this occurs.

• You have to mix up where you put your spots and when you put your spots over a four-week period. All TV campaigns should be a minimum of four weeks, even if just a weekend promotion. You have to extend those campaigns to build the reach you need in a delayed viewing environment thanks to load shedding.

• Watching “average time spent” decline during load shedding doesn’t mean much. It’s like saying: “Traffic takes much longer because the traffic lights are out.” Of course, that is the case, but it doesn’t mean there’s less traffic!

• Don’t sacrifice incremental reach for excessive frequency.

• Treat your TV plan as the “demand generating media” element and your digital as the “fulfilment media”. They are not necessarily the same thing, nor should they come from the same budget.

• Don’t look only at your short-term revenue curves. If you don’t understand diminishing returns, then conversion metrics quickly become “the tail wagging the dog”, and you’ll miss out on building bigger revenues over longer periods of time.

• Using the past six weeks (during a load-shedding period) to predict TV plans for the next six weeks is virtually an impossible task, based on how load shedding plays out in reality. Change your mindset to “test and learn” rather than guaranteeing your global clients CPP deals that will most likely never hit the mark due to load-shedding disruptions. This is sponsored content