How to build synergies in your media mix
As marketers and media planners, we’re tirelessly in the pursuit of finding that sweet spot between performance and brand investment, all the while trying to keep pace with new technologies, ad formats, media channels, and even whole, new online meta universes.
Putting a pause on the fragmentation and perplexities of media, an effective media strategy starts with identifying the key audiences, using single source and other data to segment and define their consumption patterns, and understanding the culture, category, industry, market and channel mix in which they operate. Then, we deploy media and creative to trigger consumption, unlocking growth.
But what is the optimum touchpoint mix to maximise impact in our fragmented world, and how do we create synergy once channels are chosen?
Strategic clarity before tactical execution.
It’s important for marketers and their agency partners to define their positioning (such as a single-minded-proposition, drivers of choice or other strategic communications framework) and ensure the ad is well branded, before leaping into the channel execution. If consumers cannot work out which brand the ad is for, it would take several exposures across several channels to elicit the desired sales response. The media may be working effectively, but the execution is negating any sophistication behind the placements.
Beyond brand attribution, ensuring the ad creative is integrated and extends on each ad format will assist in enhancing the impact of any repetition, rather than accidentally achieving excess frequency. Creative testing either pre-campaign or at the start will ensure costly mistakes can be avoided.
This is supported by Kantar, a leading insights and consulting firm, who has this week revealed the findings of their 2022 Creative Effectiveness Awards. As part of the study, Jane Ostler, EVP of Creative and Media Solutions at Kantar claims that channel fragmentation means a greater need to understand ad effectiveness than ever. “The integration of behavioral science techniques, better automation, and faster, more granular insights mean creative testing should be part of every team’s development cycle”.
Kantar’s Creative Effectiveness Report also showed further media investment in digital platforms, and more media channels becoming digitalised. This is not surprising, but this trend demonstrates the opportunities for new types of creative expression across all platforms and ad types, and the importance of creative effectiveness.
Build cross-channel, cumulative reach.
A study from Analytic Partners across over 3,000 campaigns from 2010 to 2015 revealed the sales and brand health effect against what channels were used. When Analytic Partners controlled for budget levels, looking at overall ROI from campaigns and the amount of channels advertisers used, they observed two channels (rather than one) provided an incremental ROI increase of 19%. What’s more, the study showed brands that embrace an omnichannel planning strategy increased ROI by 32% in comparison to those that do not.
This shows that as you add more channels, provided you have the right budget to achieve maximum efficiency, you can achieve greater overall campaign effectiveness. Again, for cross-channel resonance to work, it is important that creative can be successfully attributed to the brand with strong cues and associations back to the brand from the secondary channel.
Broaden the context of channels.
The aim of increasing the variety of the media mix is to pull fragmented audiences together to achieve reach. To create media synergy once we’ve landed on the optimum channel mix, we take a look at a more recent study from Analytic Partners.
The analysis showed that in New Zealand markets across 2015 to 2021 combining OOH, digital and TV provides 31% greater short term performance ROI when compared to just TV alone. Further to this, in a bricks and mortar context, the study also showed that the combination of OOH and mobile ads provided an uplift in store visits by 69%, when compared with OOH or mobile ads alone.
Too often we’re forced to make choices between channels. It’s crucial that we don’t make channel choices before the strategy is interrogated and tested, and we avoid the danger of silos between traditional and digital. Diversity wins. Not one or the other.
Reach out to ADMATIC’s dedicated team of media planning and digital specialists to discuss enhancing your brand’s future synergistic media mix.
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