In my quest to maximise ever limiting budgets, I’ve turned to digital media.
While I always thought of myself as rather au fait with all media, silently turning my nose at those who can’t seem to see past their single pages, gatefolds and coverwraps, I’ve only today truly realised the difficulties of abandoning the comforting solid base that print provides as I stare into my latest media plan.
I have always been a fan of the great research that the IAB (http://www.iabuk.net/) puts together and it is through my search for further digital enlightened that I came across this white paper on branding building: (http://www.iabuk.net/sites/default/files/white-paper-docs/Building%20Brands%20Online%20Trilogy%20Whitepaper.pdf).
I found the following:
“Our research shows that online channels have the ability to reach audiences where more traditional media struggle. Additionally, we have learnt that online can incrementally extend the reach of any campaign. However, the extent of this incremental reach is heavily dependent on the place of online within the total media plan. As you would expect, when there is no large scale TV campaign, online is much more likely to add incremental and exclusive reach.”
TV delivers larger reach but digital is more effective in delivering against the right target audience. Specificity against reach I suppose… Online delivers in IAB’s words “[the] ability to connect the brand message with the desired audience in a highly targeted manner.”
This seems rather obvious but is this enough? I have long since accepted that clicks and CTRs are a disappointing and scary metrics if considered alone and that you need to look at the larger brand awareness picture. I now just have to work out how to really do this…
