Looking deeper at TV should always be a priority for marketing organizations. There is typically a huge price tag, little measurement and minimal oversight from the client side once buys are approved. Once launched, agencies often end up focused on digital media because there is an immediacy to the measurement that can be affected in real time, requiring a lot of day-to-day management. This means all too often that marketers take a “set it and forget it” approach to their TV schedules.
Strategic TV buying requires experts who know your business, its objectives and how to achieve them. An integrated media team will provide solutions that go well beyond CPMs, and they will want to know how your business operates, what you want to communicate to your consumer, and how you want to communicate the message. Integrated buyers should be well-versed in your business when they go to market on your behalf. Pushing these professionals into the background means that a brand will usually end up with programming that doesn’t fit its brand, or the media investment turns into a flowchart with some bragging about year-over-year CPMs. Keeping track of your TV buys needs to entail more than tracking ADUs, post-buy analysis, tracking historical rates and allocating inventory or making projections on program ratings.
Do YOU have a buyer who understands your business, its objectives and how to achieve them?
Avoiding the “set it and forget it” trap requires detailed strategy and planning, activation and adaptive, holistic measurement with learnings that are supported by relevant technology. Media strategy should lay out the “who, what, when, where and why,” including target consumers, creative messaging, media marketplaces, competitive landscapes and the game plan for measuring success. If you can’t pinpoint how your media strategy is doing this, you need to go back to the drawing board and start filling in the blanks.
At rEvolution, media plans are built to have holistic results by using syndicated research in unison with client historical digital metrics and by working in concert with our Research and Consulting team who studies consumers and measures campaigns at all levels of the marketing mix. All of this information helps to hone in on what is successful in our overall recommendations for your media marketing mix.
New media tactics are brought into the mix in an effort to solve our clients’ business problems and make every aspect of our media plans more effective. As TV evolves with tactics, like Addressable TV, Full Episode Players (FEP), Video on Demand (VOD) and Over the Top (OTT), advertisers can capitalize on the compelling content of broadcast and the granular targeting capabilities of digital. This knowledge minimizes the risk of blindly buying inventory that often mismatches messaging to broad audiences, based only on demographic profiles and a synopsis of the potential programming. Our experience in sponsorship media informs our view of traditional media buying. We are well practiced in the art of aligning brands and fans through sport, which makes it an easy step into how we look at the discipline of media.
We believe that by understanding the control a consumer has over their own viewing habits and the multiple devices a consumer is using to watch content, our integrated team is allowed to be creative with how we approach media. We aren’t afraid to pair the traditional tactics with new and non-traditional tactics like second-screen targeting, in-stream broadcast ads or hard-coded digital video. With the consumer and media landscape fragmented like never before, we have to be ready, willing and able to solve our clients’ business problems through rEvolution’s key tenets: strategy, activation and measurement.