Advertisers should check weight between digital and traditional

Twenty-five years ago when Paul Kelly was editor-in-chief of this newspaper and I was his editor we learned the hard way what seems an eternal truth about marketing and advertising agencies.

The Australian was running an ongoing series commemorating the 50th anniversaries of many of the big World War II battles in the Pacific and Europe. We had a marketing budget that stretched to TV ads for things such as the ­anniversary of the fall of Singapore, still this paper’s biggest daily sale at 390,000 copies.

To our constant dismay we were presented with brilliant TV concepts, some of which won international creative awards. But the same agency produced print ads so woeful Kelly or I had to rewrite them all. Print was old fashioned for the young agency creatives and television was sexy.

So it is today that many advertisers are pumping large parts of their marketing budgets into digital products and, shiniest new thing of them all in the past couple of years, social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. What I know after 42 years in media is the only worthwhile ad is one that rings the cash register.

So are advertisers today weighted correctly in digital or are traditional media such as free-to-air television, newspapers and magazines oversold by the advertising industry? Channel Seven chief executive Tim Worner caused a stir a fortnight ago in this newspaper when he said the free- to-air TV industry in the US was seeing a resurgence in advertiser support because mass TV audiences worked for advertisers. Last week on this page a marketing professor at Melbourne Business School, Mark Ritson, outlined the challenge for advertisers in getting accurate measurements of, particularly, digital video views on YouTube and other platforms, the platforms for which advertisers have been leaving television.

This reflects the oldest problem in media measurement, one that still bedevils newspapers with their different circulation and readership measurement systems. Right around the world the hot topic in marketing is the lack of a standard measuring tool for digital advertising, especially for video views, where on Facebook and ­Instagram a view is three seconds. How can that be compared with ads on free-to-air television?

As News Corp Australia ad ­director Sharb Farjami said last week: “I don’t know what’s working and what isn’t but a lot of nonsense is being talked.” He said it was essential all advertisers think about marketing on digital platforms but strongly believed there was an important role for mass market media such free-to-air television and newspapers to build brands and brand awareness. He pointed to the dominance of new media product advertising in Britain this year on old media platforms as a sign that the traditional advertising engagement virtues of mass scale remain essential to brand building.

Sebastian Rennie, GroupM chief investment officer, says smart marketers should be looking for a mix of digital and traditional mass media, but agrees with Professor Ritson that advertisers need much more accurate data to measure digital effectiveness. Rennie says confidence in digital has eroded around the world over the past year.

GroupM is partnering a digital specialist company Moat to improve brand safety. Rennie says it is important new digital measurement systems allow advertisers looking at their spend to know they are comparing like with like.

Ritson said marketers and agencies had been fooled by the “latest shiny new thing”. He cited three factors: the naivety of marketers; the “fantastic way digital suppliers have promoted their wares and hidden and obfuscated” on measurement transparency but essentially done a brilliant job in taking their products in a ­decade to where their predecessors got in a century; and, third, that some agencies have found more profit in selling digital to ­advertisers. He believes this may have ­created an in-built bias ­towards digital in some instances.

While no one will say it on the record there is a suspicion across the industry that digital presents more opportunities and processes to “clip the ticket”.

Ritson was also scathing of the move to push brand advertising out on social platforms. “Social is very good for people talking to each other but precarious when you put brands in it,” he said, citing a study he commissioned in April asking 1544 Australians representative of the whole community if they actively follow any brands on social and if so how many. Of those polled by the Sydney based Online Research Unit, “64 per cent said no and of the 36 per cent who did most followed fewer than six brands. So the median number of brands followed is zero and the mean is between one and two. Why isn’t anyone bloody talking about this?”

“This is the strangest time in my 25 years in marketing,” he said last week. He cited the half-page double-page spread Breitling ads in The Australian and the Tiffany’s centre spread in The Wall Street Journal as two of the best value ads for engagement with the right ­target market anywhere in the world. Farjami adds last year’s double-page Etihad ad featuring Nicole Kidman to the list.

But Farjami believes the digital debate is a matter of balance. “Whilst trying new things is really important for a media industry, we should be clear about what ­accountability looks like. I think there is a bit of a swing back going on, a bit of rebalancing.”

Farjami says different platforms have different virtues but if you want to launch a new brand to millions of people you need a platform seen by millions of people. “The way people buy a house, take a mortgage or buy a car is changing and as an industry we could all work harder on tailoring ads to those changes.”

Rennie takes up the point. Marketers must understand how digital developments affect the lives of their clients, he notes. But it is not as clear-cut as digital being best for acquisition and traditional mass media for brand building even though filling the top of the funnel with traditional media is certainly an important part of building brands. He adds: “It is important to get the balance right in advertising decisions but a lot of assumptions are being made ... and we don’t really have the data to back them up. But you can’t get away from the fact that media consumption patterns are changing and digital is changing the lives of consumers.’’