Pure-play Internet companies find success advertising offline, too (first of two parts).
While multi-media hungry consumers are giving marketers a run for their money, pure-play Internet companies are demonstrating how to successfully win customers over through integrated campaigns containing, of all things, a TV component.
With the flood of pure play Internet companies advertising on TV, one would think it was 1999 all over again. Dozens of bullish brands are taking a leap of faith into television, helping to curb the media industry’s overriding fear of TV advertising’s downfall. However, this time around, dotcoms don’t simply have their heads in the clouds. They are using integrated campaigns to help balance their return on investment (ROI).
Although ad spending may have peaked during the holidays and the Super Bowl, online companies are proving they need no special occasion to pay the lofty prices demanded by campaigns with a TV component.
Marketing teams, recognizing that their one-channel marketing strategies fail to capture today’s media hungry consumers, are trying to understand audiences which have less predictable behavior patterns. The abundance of media alternatives and formats is giving consumers new ways to consume -- ways that cannot be accurately tracked by our existing tools. Integrated marketing is proving to be the most successful way to communicate parallel to the way audiences now multitask.
Television + Web = Best Multitasking Combo
The most recent study on simultaneous media usage has once again confirmed what many media professionals predicted: audiences continue to absorb several media at once.
Agora/BIGresearch’s study revealed that 70 percent of media users try, at one time or another, to use two or more forms of media at once. It also revealed that, of those who watch TV regularly or occasionally and use another medium, 74.2 percent are reading the newspaper and 66.2 percent are online. Of those consumers using the Internet as the foreground medium, 52.1 percent say they listen to a favorite tune or talk radio when waiting to download something online, 61.8 percent say they watch TV and 20.2 percent read the newspaper.
Buyers and planners need to begin accounting for this growing multitasking society, not only to communicate with consumers effectively, but also to maximize their companies’ return.
Which combination can be leveraged most successfully?
Online advertising is particularly effective when combined with TV, says an IAB Canada study that examined the value-added role Internet advertising plays in the overall media mix. For campaigns using TV and the Web together, versus TV only, the findings show a 48 percent lift in tagline association, a 16 percent lift in key brand relevance metric and a 35 percent lift in event sponsorship association. From the consumer perspective, calls to action from TV to the Internet are simple and intuitive. And from the company’s perspective, driving traffic online -- the most cost-efficient and measurable place to do business -- is the ultimate goal.
While TV has been known to effectively deliver emotion, radio is seen as somewhat neutral, print fills in the data gaps, direct mail directs immediate action and last, but not least, the Internet is morphing into a mixture of these roles. Modern marketing executives are realizing the power of combining the strength of each medium into integrated campaigns, even though their brands may have been established on the foundation of one channel. An integrated campaign has the potential to separate an online provider from both its Web and non-Internet competition.
A Web Portal Re-brands via TV
On April 8, Yahoo! unveiled a $100 million TV ad campaign to brand the company as the “Life Engine” for its users. The four 30-second spots, by Soho Square in New York, use split screens to compare two Yahoo! users -- a celebrity and a regular person. The company is marketing the strength of its various properties, not just an overall one as it has done in the past.
In one spot, former California governor Gray Davis is paired with a junior high school student who uses Yahoo! Mail to persuade classmates to vote for her as treasurer of the eighth grade. Meanwhile, Davis uses the search engine to look for a new job, and says, “If a former actor can be governor, maybe a former governor can be an actor.” The spot ends with a voice-over describing Yahoo! as a “Search engine. Music engine. Life engine.” And it trails off with the Yahoo! yodel.
Another spot features Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, juxtaposed with Charlie 2una, a member of the hip-hop group Jurassic 5, talking about how they use Launch, Yahoo!’s online music service. Part of what makes these spots a success is a creative strategy that presents the audience with two different demographics, each using Yahoo! to achieve a certain goal.
Yahoo!’s last brand campaign in February 2002 positioned it primarily as a destination for search, but the new one hopes to empower people in both their professional and personal lives. As the most trafficked Internet destination worldwide, Yahoo! has previously utilized TV campaigns for its shopping and personals departments, rather than for re-branding. The company made history in 1996 as one of the first dotcoms to debut TV commercials, with the long-running “Do You Yahoo!?” campaign.
Tomorrow: Why would pure-plays sacrifice the precise target demos and measurability of Internet advertising -- and who else is doing it?
Rebecca Weeks currently directs Strategic Marketing at Citrus, an interactive brand response agency in Los Angeles. She is known for her exceptional industry analysis and trend-spotting skills.