Marketers Caught Between A Rock (TV) And A Hard Place (Digital)

If you think about it, marketers today simply can’t win when making a smart decision about where to place their ad budgets.

TV used to be the steady rock in the marketer’s relationship with advertising: sizeable, trusted and to a degree predictable. But the once-steady rock today has many real and a few perceived flaws chipping away at its role in the media mix. Enough with the rock metaphors; allow me to explain.

Despite the industry’s solid belief in GRPs, TV advertising is historically a medium with thin and crude measurement at its base. I have alluded in earlier posts to the fact that Nielsen measures America’s love affair with “Scandal” or “The Big Bang Theory” through a national sample of a little over 16,000 households. This in turn generates household ratings, the most coveted one being the 18-49 rating.

Take a moment and let this sink in. The value of and the inclusion in the plan is based on a tiny slice of the population. And the most frequently traded target reflects gigantic differences in life stage. What do you think the motivations are for a 20-year-old ordering pizza versus a 45-year-old mom of three?

And then there is the “where they watch,” “how they watch” and “when they watch” problem. C3 ratings? C-7 ratings? C-30 ratings? The question “what is a rating?” used to focus only on how People Meters actually worked. Now it also relates to when a viewer should be counted.

And if that isn’t enough, marketers have to contend with the ever-increasing cost of buying TV airtime while audiences are flat or slightly declining. This decrease is especially true for younger viewers, who simply don’t think linear TV is all that relevant anymore.

Which brings us to the hard place that holds all forms of digital advertising.

The promise of digital is compelling: Always on! Personal! Infinitely measurable and measured!

In principle, digital advertising should be cheaper on all fronts: cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy (no 18-49 buying targets here!) and cheaper to measure (no People Meters needed!). The reality is that marketers are buying and producing so much digital that, relative to its impact on the marketing mix, it takes up a disproportionate amount of the marketing budget as well as eating up enormous amounts of marketing management time.

To top it off, digital advertising is riddled with fraud. There are some enormous numbers flying around. Kraft says that 80% to 90% of the digital advertising it buys is worthless. Earlier this year, Mercedes Benz in the U.K. pegged the number at 57%. Whichever you believe, both are shocking.

The reality is that digital has become an advertising mess and a marketer’s worst nightmare. The consumer is certainly always on, and able to make the experience highly personal. But for marketers, this has not translated into digital becoming a viable alternative to the diminishing value, impact and position of the rock that once was TV.

I have often said I am not against TV, nor am I against digital. Equally, I am not in favor of TV or digital. I am interested in finding the right path to connect consumers with brands — and, when appropriate, vice versa. Right place, right time, right message, right context, and so on. But the two options that are, in principle, best placed to do so are both challenged and imperfect.

Now what?

By Maarten Albarda
Maarten has lived in five countries across three continents and honed his integrated marketing communication skills at JWT, Leo Burnett, McCann-Erickson, The Coca-Cola Company and AB-InBev. He now runs his own integrated marketing consultancy in partnership with Flock Associates, and has written the book “Z.E.R.O.” with Joseph Jaffe.