Roman Magis – Principal Director: Video, Advertising and Content for Accenture in South Africa – states that modern consumers now also connect with brands at an average of four to six touchpoints and they migrate from traditional platforms to digital devices to generate deeper insights before they take the desired action.
The media landscape continues to shift, with consumer expectations driving innovation and new players disrupting traditional ways of broadcasting. To survive in this increasingly technology-driven era, native broadcasters have no choice but to undergo a digital transformation, rethink their business models and embrace digital distribution as a new source of revenue.
Pros and cons of the new marketplace
As much as this shift to digital created a much more complex marketing and advertising landscape, it also poses several advantages and creates synergies between traditional and digital advertising. For one, it is now possible for us to obtain information on our consumers and for example learn who they are, where they live, and what their preferences are.
This inspired new marketing and advertising approaches such as audience pool selection and hyper-personalisation makes it possible for us to target our campaigns more appropriately and create messaging that appeals to our individual audiences. It also enables us to track campaign performance, monitor results and determine conversion rates and return on investment (ROI).
As a result, marketers and advertisers have increased their spend on digital channels in the belief that it is the best way to get in front of the right audiences. A study by Accenture that was commissioned by NBC Universal, however, found that television still generates superior brand-building ROI, that television has a significant enhancement, or ‘halo effect’ on the impact of digital channels and that it helps generate a multiplier effect when paired with other channels in the same publisher ecosystem.
In addition, traditional ads create a higher level of trust, which compounds the success of efforts on digital platforms. The reason for this is that digital advertising space can usually be bought anonymously, with a credit card. Traditional spots have high production costs and broadcasters typically require a credit rating before concluding an agreement with the advertiser. This means that you will almost never see fraudulent advertising on traditional media as the advertising costs are higher and the source is known.
Another knock-on effect of digitised marketing and advertising platforms is that it has created a lot of ‘noise’, as people get inundated by content from all corners. Subsequently, some of the social media platforms have even created blocking software, which enables consumers to block content from brands they no longer wish to see. In this ocean of online content, it is also becoming more and more difficult for brands to stand out from the ‘grey masses’.
Future-proof your business by converging marketing and advertising
For broadcasters, the key to getting ahead of their competitors and unlock optimal growth lies in establishing the exceptional capability to collate and interpret consumer data to gain a true, complete view of their customers. This will enable you to design the right campaign that consists of the right blend of traditional and digital marketing and advertising for optimal impact, at a minimal budget.
It will also enable you to set yourself apart from your competitors through immersive experiences that deliver the right message to the right customer, at the right time and on the right platform. In addition, it will empower you to track your campaign performance in real-time and make the necessary adjustments timeously, to drive optimal business results.
Whilst this is ideal, the reality is that most companies only have access to fragmented data that sits in marketing and advertising divisions that are operating in complete silos. Converging your marketing and advertising will not only help you counteract this issue, but it will also deliver several additional business benefits.
Key benefits of converging marketing and advertising
How to converge marketing and advertising
• Consolidate technology and capability: marketing and advertising convergence can be achieved by consolidating the technology and capabilities with which these two business areas perform their respective functions into one marketing and advertising technology stack (MAD-tech). The marketing department requires planning and campaign management tools to monitor and optimise their marketing campaigns, based on results and success, while the advertising sales department needs to utilise similar metrics for their clients.
• Consolidate planning across all disciplines: to be successful in converging marketing and advertising on a single MAD-tech stack requires a consolidated digital and traditional advertising and planning approach. This will ensure that the unique requirements and objectives of both functions are effectively achieved and used.
Advertising sales are more successful when it is driven by a fully integrated campaign strategy that leverages the unique proposition of all available media properties, audience pools and segments to reach the right combination of end-users through the right media, at exactly the right time. The marketing department is dependent on these very same planning skills to create successful marketing campaigns.
• Establish a singular data management platform (DMP): a single DMP will substantially enhance audience selection which will, in turn, improve the campaign success and click-through rates (CTRs). This is because a DMP enables you to collect interest and behaviour data on the entire digital audience while ingesting customer data to enhance the data set, using first and second-party data (customer relationship management (CRM) data, as well as data sets from business partners and affiliates).
The same data and audiences can be applied to external and internal properties, which also increases the value of the inventory. It benefits the advertising department as it enables them to achieve optimal audience extension with data impressions (reaching customers beyond the website via external impressions with overlaid customer data). It also benefits the marketing department by enabling them to accurately target existing consumers on external properties such as social media.
Finally, the same data can be used to create custom segments for advertisers, creating a tailored advertising approach for specific brands, while the segments can also be sold separately, using the connections into advertising exchange platforms via demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs).
• Utilise one CRM system: both internal (marketing) clients and external advertising clients should use one CRM system to determine how much value is kept for marketing, and how many impressions are sold internally versus externally. Using such a single platform further enables accurate tracking and monitoring of the entire campaign history and makes it possible to leverage synergies between marketing and advertising optimally.
• Establish and share a trading desk: based on insights from datasets obtained from the DMP, the advertising team can achieve targeted audience extension and drive sales by placing ads with appropriate messages (external impressions) with the right online publishers. The same external impressions can be shared with the marketing department, to ensure consistent and appropriate communication across all consumer touchpoints.
• Sharing creative services: creative services across marketing and advertising are similar, except for the fact that marketing is using its own branding for the applicable creatives, while advertising is designing creatives using external branding and CI (corporate identity), subject to a brief, either from the agency or the advertiser directly. These creative skills are needed in both areas and are more dependent on the media used (audio, video or display) than the actual brand.
• Campaign management: the management of advertising campaigns is always based on a certain outcome and key performance indicators (KPIs). Marketing and advertising typically use the same metrics, such as cost per thousand (CPM), conversion per impression (CPI), cost per click (CPC), cost per action (CPA), etc. and are aiming at a certain return on investment (ROI) and success rate. The skills to execute those campaigns are almost identical and learning from internal campaigns can both be employed externally and used for case studies.
Ultimately, to captivate the attention of their audiences in a multichannel marketing and advertising environment, broadcasters need a unified source of accurate consumer profiles that are updated in real-time, and that can be activated across traditional and digital channels, through a singular, intelligent and scalable system. Converging your marketing and advertising will help you to accomplish exactly that.
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