Digital or Traditional Media, ‘the Conversion Rate Challenge’

The channel war is one of those discussions that is never out of season or geography in marketing. Wherever you turn, you can find one marketer (usually the ‘digital marketer’) shrugging in bemusement at the wastefulness of traditional channel spend. Minutes after seeing this Digital or Traditional Media header as the topic of Marketing Edge’s virtual quarterly summit on LinkedIn, I see another post on the same platform from a UK based user lamenting about a brand’s poor channel approach. This person surmised about how much Tik-Tok and Instagram ad she could buy with the budget that said brand apparently spent running TV spots in one night on the UK’s long running reality TV show — Love Island.

Yet channels, all channels are tools, means to an end, rather than the end itself and as I will attempt to show below, channels effectiveness depends on the marketing context and more often than not, the digital/traditional dichotomy is a false choice.

All Media are Digital or becoming digitized.

Search and social media are unmistakable as digital channels but where does Punch newspapers fall into, online or offline? How about digital billboards? Locally, you can now get demographic data as well as buy dayparts programmatically. Is this level of digital out-of-home advertising traditional or digital? The point is the debate is a moot one as the so-called ‘traditional media’ have become increasingly digitized. Do not take my word for it, below is erstwhile Mediacom’s Global Innovations Director, Tom Goodwin:

‘There is not a more meaningless divide and obsession than the notion of digital media. Media channels were once clearly distinguished and named from the physical devices that we used to consume them. Radio ads played on radios and were audio, TV ads played on TV’s and were moving images, newspaper ads were images in the paper while outdoor ads were the images around us. In 2014 the naming legacy is both misleading and of no value. I listen to the radio on my phone, read the newspapers on a laptop, watch YouTube on my TV and read magazines on my iPad. Our old media channels mean nothing yet their names survive and mislead us into artificially limited thinking. We focus endlessly on battles of no meaning like on whether digital is eating TV, rather than unleashing our minds on the new possibilities and how best to buy media and supply messages in the digital age’

Marketing Contexts (Target audience, Position and Objectives) should shape Channel Selection.

Despite being sexagenarians, my mother and mother in-law share little else in common, to start with, one is a devout Muslim, the other a deaconess, one is a no-nonsense disciplinarian who taught primary school students for nearly 40 years, the other, a matronly, genial housewife who dedicated all her time to raising her children. But there is one other thing they have in common: African Magic Yoruba. Every time this two people are in the house, the cable TV will be on channel 157. Their media habit is eerily similar. What can the digital vs traditional media warriors learn from that? Determining effective channel starts with understanding contexts, contexts like who is the target audience and what is the best way to reach her? If you are the marketing communications manager of a pensions company trying to grow customer acquisition by leveraging the recent rule change on account movement, TV and African Magic Yoruba specifically is a key tool to reach the above retired teacher.

A 2nd crucial marketing context is the strategic positioning the advertiser is trying to achieve in the consumer’s mind. Alcoholic brands in Nigeria get this, it is not just APCON regulations that make them prioritise out-of-home advertising in their channel planning, on the contrary, their heavy use of the channel is an attempt to create and reinforce a large than life persona for their brands — positioning that is key to doing well in that category.

Larger than Life — Beer brand Hero on a supersized billboard in Abuja

Source: Allianz Media

The final context is the objective of the media investment — the marketing challenge. Is the brand trying to grow awareness or increase purchase? Different channel do better at different stages of the customer journey. Savvy marketers know this and would not commit to any channel prior to understanding the marketing challenge and the different tools that are great (and weak) at the challenge. Take the challenge of awareness creation at the top of the funnel, research after research has demonstrated the effective of the more ‘traditional’ channels. That’s why Google will routinely run radio campaigns to create awareness about its search engine! Meanwhile, further down the funnel, paid search, an entirely digital channel is the best fit for a brand with sufficient levels of awareness but with a product that consumers would often research about ahead of purchase.

Different Channels are Great (and weak) at Different Challenge

Source: Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in a Digital Age

The Tale of two plumbers

A good analogy to emphasize how the digital vs traditional argument misses the point is the story of two plumbers. A homeowner wakes up to a pool of water in his children’s room, he traces the water to the adjoining bathroom but cannot figure out what the problem is. He calls a plumber who shows up in no time and gets to work without asking any questions. The plumber spends the next couple of hours literally looking for nails because all he has is a hammer. He departs afterwards with the whole house now flooded, the problem unsolved. The homeowner is forced to get a 2nd plumber who begins by asking a couple of germane questions; when did you notice the flow of water? how long ago did you use the faucet? etc. Only after listening to the homeowner and having inspected the faucet does this 2nd plumber bring out tools. He fixes the leakage in no time and is sent forte with a generous reward. The first plumber is the one trick pony that wants to use his singular tool for every marketing challenge while the 2nd plumber is the better trained marketer who treats every channel with scepticism prior to understanding the marketing challenge.

(Story credit — former Harvard professor and marketing guru Mark Ritson)

How Advertising Really Works

In their seminal work — ‘The Long and the Short of It’, Les Binet and Peter Field, affectionately known as the godfathers of advertising effectiveness — show that advertising work in two broad ways — in the short and long term. The short term is the bottom of the marketing funnel where channels that activate conversions are most appropriate while the longer term refers to the top of the funnel where brand building is fundamental. They go further to link different channels with the context in which they are most effective.

‘’The issue of reach shapes the balance of channel planning in a number of ways. The first of these is in the allocation of SOV across channels. Channels with broad reach form natural candidates for brand building, whereas those permitting tighter targeting are more appropriate for short-term activation. Some channels such as TV and the wider internet are essentially ‘ambidextrous’ in this respect, but many channels can be more easily characterised as brand or activation focused. Thus TV, radio, and other traditional display media as well as online display, are, primarily, broad-reach ‘brand-building channels’; search, direct marketing, sales promotion and classified media are more geared to short-term selling to narrow audiences as ‘activation channels’’.

Source: The Long and the Short of It

The Power of Synergies

Not only do different channels do different things well (and poorly), research from a number of sources, most notably Analytic Partners, show the most effective approach to channel planning to be one that combines digital channels with the so-called traditional ones. Drawing from their global data, they demonstrate clearly and strongly that synergies are created when channels are combined.

Combining Channels Create Synergies

Source: Analytic Partners; Marketing in the time of a Pandemic

In the end, ‘digital media’ or ‘traditional media’ is that classic situation in which the right choice is to get the best of both, rather than accepting a false choice. The answer is almost always to integrate both for a superior outcome.