15
2010
Jumping On The Online Advertising Bandwagon
The ANA and Forrester recently surveyed a set of national advertisers. The purpose of the research was to gauge marketers attitudes towards TV and video advertising. The findings were that TV spending is expected to be about flat in 2010 compared to 2009. However, 2009 was down from 2008. What wasn’t down in 2009 compared to 2008?
The results also indicate where marketers plan to invest in 2010 (if not on TV). Again, the results were not surprising. Marketers plan to invest more online through vehicles such as social media, web advertising, search engine marketing and email marketing. The common theme between the reasons why TV remains flat while the online advertising segment grows is that marketers want better measurement. On one hand, marketers indicate through the survey results that they are not satisfied with TV measurement and ratings systems. On the other hand, online advertising provides more measurement and accountability.
Marketers, don’t give up on TV yet. While TV is often more challenging to measure than online advertising, there are many ways to determine the efficacy of TV. If your TV spending is measured purely on ratings, frequency or reach, you are not looking deep enough at how well it is working. You need to dig deeper and understand the return on investment. Questions you should be asking and answering include:
- Is my brand awareness increasing?
- Are more people considering my brand or product?
- Is my website traffic increasing?
- Are more people visiting my stores?
- Are my leads increasing?
- Are my sales increasing?
By isolating markets and testing TV levels while keeping other marketing variables consistent, you can better understand the impact of your TV buy. If done right, you can answer the set of questions above and compare test vs. control markets allowing TV value to be quantified.
How are you planning to invest marketing and advertising dollars in 2010? How are you going to measure the ROI on your spend? We’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss your media and ROI challenges. Let us know here on the blog or contact us to start the dialog.
Top image courtesy of: mynameis.jeime (flickr.com)
