David Deeley, Consumer & Market Insight Team, Bord Bia - Irish Food Board
At Millward Brown’s Digital & Media Breakfast seminar during the week, Brand Ambassador Ariane Längsfeld spoke about measuring multimedia, with a focus on digital & mobile campaign effectiveness, as well as the top media trends that consumers don’t even know about. These trends have countless implications for food and drink brands, here they are:
#1 Sometimes, traditional methods are more effective
The first trend looked at the growth of digital advertising, which coupled with that of television makes up to half of all media spend in Ireland—an equal split of about one quarter each. While spend has been moving from other channels to facilitate this growth, the research findings say that more traditional channels are perhaps more effective, especially when building brand awareness.
For instance, Ariane compared print with digital based on their effectiveness to shift brand awareness, what she found was that print, while it is losing spend to digital, still packs a hefty punch. The reason being that print feels far less invasive, while digital in some regard can actually increase negativity that consumers have in relation to a brand’s advertising. The idea that a brand can access information like, our age, what we have previously searched for and where in the world we are, while being a great opportunity to build on campaign effectiveness, in the eyes of the consumer is an invasion of privacy. Furthermore, digital follows us wherever we go – there is no escaping it. The learning here, is that it isn’t all about digital; in other words, ‘don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.’ Apple, even takes time to escape their own devices, as can be seen in the campaign below:
#2 Everyone is talking about online video, but consumers are only seeing TV ads online
With Irish consumers spending on average 3.5 hours per day watching video (online and offline), a lot of what they are exposed to is inappropriate for the channels they are consuming the video on. For example, if you’re watching an ad created specifically for TV on YouTube it won’t have the same effect, as the occasion is very different. What we take from this is that we should create video specific to the medium it is bound to end up on. Videos that go viral online are of a different type of intelligence, and sometimes their only purpose is to entertain. It’s therefore not adequate to simply copy and paste content that was meant for television .The best example I have come across from a brand is the Geico YouTube ad, available to watch here. As Geico have very obviously recognised, if you give your consumers the chance to skip your content—they will! It can be prevented by including humour, getting the brand in the first cut of the video and being relevant and target (carefully!) to your audience.
#3 The return of the silent movie
More and more, consumers are viewing movies without sound. If they are scrolling their News Feed on Facebook during their commute, the auto-play function results in consumers watching videos with no audio. Brands now need to create content that instils brand messaging that does not rely on sound.
For more information please contact David.Deeley@BordBia.ie