Advertising Archives - YouCom

Drip or Burst?

Philip Wimbledon — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 23:01:17 +0000

Speed is the question as often as it is the answer. With advertising, do you run a fast short campaign (a ‘burst’ strategy) where the frequency of advert exposure is high over a short period?

Or do you run a slow long campaign (a ‘drip’ strategy) where your advertising is going out less frequently but for longer?

Certainly, a new brand or new product, a re-launched brand/product, or a new concept, something outside the status quo, will need a high frequency burst campaign to reach the most amount of people and get sales up to recoup investment plus build market share.

A brand already well positioned with their target audience only needs relatively low levels of awareness to reinforce the brand (PG Tips is a good example).

The drip strategy is good for firms with less seasonality such as staple food brands like Birds Eye Peas or Jacket Potatoes. The all-year-rounder brand. While, as discussed, technology will suit a burst campaign because it looks to recruit as many new users as possible before it’s either replaced or ‘benchmarked’ (ideas stolen & copied) by competitors.

So, whereas a traditional app download campaign works cost-effectively for established brands, new app ideas require a burst of activity to create a large number of downloads, fast.

This burst approach builds the user-base, but also impacts on the app rank in the download charts. Gaining that top spot in the download charts will lead to organic downloads of their own.

This is similar to how we use PPC to boost SEO. We prefer SEO (it costs us a lot less money!) but PPC is needed to get the brand reach. Some apps will require a burst campaign that is scheduled with events and the seasonality of certain categories.

Therefore, if you have a Daddy Christmas app, it’s no good paying for drip marketing in July. It would have greater ROI if advertised on the lead up to Christmas.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) as one more channel in the marketing mix can work with burst marketing strategies but it does perform rather well with drip marketing. You can schedule social media posts in advance and specify the frequency.

Many brands also use the drip strategies to close a sale. For instance, the shopping carts online that get abandoned can be followed up with drip messaging.

Persistent burst follow-up messaging will deter the sale, but drip marketing offers the ability to remain in the buyer’s mind and prompt a call-to-buy action, without risking the relationship.

There is a third strategy less well known. This is known as pulsing.

Pulsing combines the two strategies of drip and burst. This spreads advertising out over a period with some days on and some days off.

So instead of a burst of advertising, or a regular low-level frequency of advertising, there is a small burst and then an absence, then a small burst again.

As expected it can be quite expensive. However, when run in sync with good modelling it can result in better ROI. For instance, say you have a radio campaign that generates post-campaign sales for the next three weeks. Should you have had a burst campaign planned, you would now move to a pulse strategy of repeating the campaign every three weeks.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

Glossary:

SMM – Social Media Marketing

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Oct 2019, London, ‘Drip or Burst?’

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TV Advertising ROI

Philip Wimbledon — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 17:09:54 +0000

At YouCom Media we ask the question, ‘is TV advertising still relevant for good ROI?’.

Young Milan graphic designer, Kevin Niggeler, designed this above image to ask “how influenced are we by adverts on TV?”.

Well, the Television Bureau of Advertising and Knowledge Networks Inc. seems to think we still are, by reporting that 37 percent of those watching TV adverts will decide to buy something, compared to only 7 percent watching an advert on social networks.

Television ads have had to evolve however and are now something of an art form, utilising new technology and special effects. They must convey many different kinds of emotions to sway your purchase patterns within just a few seconds.

A good TV advert has to tell a story in 30 seconds. That’s tough to do. Many are only 15 seconds and require real skill not just to art direct but also for the advertising agency to conceptualise.

In the Old Spice advert, they achieved a large spike in search trends during the adverts, but also there were more people searching for Old Spice 1-3 years after the campaign, than prior to the advertising campaign.

Many of Hollywood’s top film directors like Ridley Scott, began directing TV adverts because to tell a story in 30 seconds allows them to hone their craft.

That makes TV adverts engage with consumers and deliver ROI. Jessel Monteverde says “A good TV commercial provides a clear message for the promotion of product/service/brand. It reaches the maximum number of a specific target audience and rises above the clutter of ads. A great TV commercial offers the viewer some other value over and above just the promotion of the product/service/brand”.

TV advertising must fight for every percentage of ROI with so many alternative platforms vying for consumer attention, but it is still a powerful centre-piece of any integrated multi-platform campaign.

According to a 30,000-strong study by market research firm Nielsen, 58 percent of respondents said they browse the internet while watching TV.

Another 47 percent said they are using social media while watching TV.

To make good ROI from TV advertising, brands need to run effective paid and organic search campaigns for online media.

Timing is everything. Brands should increase their PPC bids for text ads and PLAs in the 30 minutes before and after their TV adverts go live to ensure brand exposure when consumers go to search for additional information.

People watching TV adverts mostly don’t remember the brand but they do remember the product need.

When they hit their tablet or iPhone, you want your product to be found and to link back to your TV advert imagery because this will create a memory link that increases the probability consumers click on your online result and not the competition.

To produce good PLA results, remember that these reflect products and product categories, not keywords. So here, brands will bid on a product and Google will decide which keywords are relevant when they decide whether or not to display your item in the search result page.

PLA’s appear at the top and top-right corner of search results. A good PLA bid placement and PPC advert can link up nicely with your TV advert to maximise ROI from TV advertising.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

Glossary:

PLA – Product Listing Ads

Data source:

Home Page Image – You can see more graphics designed by Kevin Niggeler on his website

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Jun 2017, London, ‘TV Advertising ROI.’

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Digital Signage

Philip Wimbledon — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 17:05:03 +0000

The multi-location retailer GAME has become the latest brand to announce a move into digital signage to achieve engagement with its customers. This is because animated digital media signage creates double the level of engagement to ordinary media.

The APS Group ran a survey on 1.6million high street consumers and identified that almost twice as many people engaged with shop window displays if the retailer used animated, digital media content instead of traditional print.

6.6 percent look at traditional print (think shop front, billboard, bus stop advert).
9.9 percent look at a digital screen (non-animated).
11.7 percent engaged with a digital screen with animated content.

According to Arbitron, digital signage has a recall rate higher than any other traditional media with 83 percent of people remembering at least one advert seen on a digital billboard in the previous 30 days. Additionally, Intel Corp claim that Digital displays capture 400 percent more views than static displays.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Mar 2016, London, ‘Digital Signage Media Doubles Audience.’

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Premiership TV Ads

Philip Wimbledon — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 13:53:55 +0000

With the 2016-19 Premier League broadcast rights selling for a record £5billion and those costs expected to be passed on to advertisers, we ask the question; when will brands stop advertising?

On the 10th February 2015, a fierce bidding war ensued between Sky Sports and BT Sport for broadcast rights to the English Premier League. Sky was forced to spend a staggering £4.176 billion to retain the maximum possible number of matches (126 games). BT Sport won the remaining games (42 games).

TV advertising and Football/soccer has become so powerful a combination that the English FA with a good team of lawyers and rights experts were able to secure this 70% increase in revenues from the two broadcasters. All 20 Premiership clubs will be queuing up to congratulate the FA for such a vast increase in wealth.

However when broadcasters are forced to pay more to televise a sport, brands have to pay more to advertise. The broadcaster has to make their money back somehow. In an interview with Ad Age, Honda’s assistant vice president for advertising, Tom Peyton, argues that the cost of advertising is now so high that they are forced to choose only a few events to engage with. Honda spends more than $600 million on U.S. television advertising annually, sponsoring the Honda Classic golf tournament, the Rose Bowl’s Rose Parade, and the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks.

FedEx are another brand which had advertised in the US Super Bowl sports event for 19 years consecutively until 2009, but then stopped. They have never returned. It simply costs too much and is no longer returning a profitable ROI for their brand.

The vast amount of choice available to consumers now with the internet, cable TV and other entertainment options, consumers are rarely watching the same TV channel. Brand advertisers aiming to reach a large amount of people have until now paid the increasing rates to advertise, but with the rise of competitive offerings from online channels like Facebook are their days numbered?

YouCom Media and its subsidiaries focus on planning media advertising that will meet a client’s ROI targets. There will come a time when we tell clients who represent some of the major brands that the ROI of advertising on Sky Sports or BT Sports for the English Premier League no longer delivers against their ROI targets. And if the advertisers stop advertising, Sky will struggle to survive a £4 billion debt.

Required reference:

YouCom Media News article, Feb 2015, London, TV Advertising in the Premiership’

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