Traditional Media vs Digital Marketing
Seven Word Summary: A Traditional Media Guide for Business Leaders.
In the current marketplace, there’s never been more advertising channels competing for your precious marketing spend.
Alongside this abundance of new techniques and strategies we’re also subjected to an array of unhelpful buzzwords, herd-mentality soundbites, pesky acronyms and just genuine falsehoods hiding in plain sight.
Depending on who you talk to, traditional media is ‘dead’ and digital marketing is the only ‘smart’ thing to do. But like everything in life, it’s not that simple.
If you’ve just started a business, are committed to growing your current customer base or if you’ve just taken the helm of a behemoth brand that’s underperforming, these inflationary times mean amplified scrutiny for every dollar invested in generating revenue.
Hence, to aid in deciphering the maze of advertising mediums that vie for our daily dollar, I’ve compiled below a balanced introduction for each possible option you’re bound to encounter.
Refer to it when approached by marketing companies, advertising agencies, media entities or digital firms.
TRADITIONAL MEDIA
PRINT (Newspapers and Magazines):
Major metropolitan and regional mastheads still capture a significant audience – possibly the largest reachable audience in one placement - yet their ‘number of readers’ figures should always be taken with a grain of salt.
To be astute in your cost-benefit-analysis, you always go off the circulation figures: the actual number of copies printed and distributed either by delivery to homes and cafes or to outlets for purchase.
‘Audience’ figures are compiled through adding together the circulation number, then including the historically reported multiple readers from a single printed edition. Think about how many individuals might browse through a café’s copy of the paper across a single day, or how a single subscriber might have a household of 4 people.
While it’s true that Newspapers spend considerable resources trying to get direct subscribers in dual print and digital packages (which work really well and allow for large online audiences), the circulation figure is what the company is prepared to outlay in terms of its own finite resources coupled to its expected potential returns. That’s why it’s the wiser choice.
A caveat to the above is if your newspaper or magazine is being given away for free, then the printed number is largely rendered immaterial and you’re on shaky ground obtaining proper audience figures.
Don’t forget too that printing a newspaper is no piece of cake – it takes a large workforce to get a newspaper onto the trucks every morning and that’s why its advertising rates are substantially higher than Radio or Digital. It’s also still a great way of capturing a large amount of people, via one medium on one day.
The second major benefit of a Newspapers is the ‘Brand-Safe’ angle. Don’t get me wrong, this concept is milked heavily for its perceived importance. However, The West Australian for example, is a brand entrenched in the DNA of this state, with a history going back 190 years. While some of its political and cultural commentary can antagonise people on both sides of the isle, it retains its status as a trusted source for information and an emblem of our state. By supporting mastheads such as this, brands also support the chief apparatus for holding governments and businesses accountable – investigative journalism.
Certain Subscription-Only and Retailer magazines can also be perfect brand environments as you’re literally going straight into to a target demographic’s chosen environment. Think trade publications and business publications, etc. But it’s generally a condensed field: a magnified pool of potential interest. In other words, you’re missing anyone on the peripheries. The upside is that through being seen to support these publications, it demonstrates to industry participants that you’re committed to that industry as a stakeholder and so positive brand alignment will entail.
RADIO:
Who doesn’t love Radio? True, its official audience figures are obtained through a little bit of the dark arts (don’t start me on CUME), but with most people listening to the radio while they’re driving their car, there aren’t many advertising mediums around which can offer a punter a largely un- distractable audience. Granted, they’re driving and focused on the road, however this has generally been woven into second nature, allowing them to absorb what’s heard on the airwaves.
The key caveat to the above though, is that studies have clearly showed that while radio listeners overall are loyal to their station(s), the truth is that in the car at least, we are a nation of flickers.
How many times of a night and day would you hear the radio announcer asking you to “keep it locked”? Or perhaps you’ve noticed why there’s so many cash and holiday giveaways and you can’t miss the cue? There’s a very good reason for this: most of us, especially those under 25, admit to changing the station regularly to avoid adverts. People are also partial to changing stations when any song comes on that’s not within their preferred genre. To combat this, sometimes a station will program their adbreaks in line with their competitor stations, so if you switch stations you still cop adverts.
The good news is that with radio stations being cheaper to run than Newspapers or TV Stations, the advertising rates are accessible enough to ‘factor in the flickers’, while still capturing enough of your target demo to get traction and ROI.
Of course, another elephant in the room is the music streaming platforms’ exponential growth. Don’t want to be interrupted in your hour-long morning commute and want to hear exactly what you’re interested in? Stick on a podcast on Spotify. Likewise for music – stick on a playlist. This is the new norm for many people and it will only grow. There’s the advent too of digital radio inbuilt into new cars, meaning you can stream a radio station in Norway, rather than Northbridge, while you’re bumper to bumper on Marmion Ave.
TELEVISION:
When Television advertising became a big thing in the early 1960’s, it quickly became the most expensive yet creatively satisfying and humanly stimulating medium in a marketer’s arsenal.
Today with the advent of Paid TV, Streaming platforms, TV on Demand (Commercial Station streaming platforms) and the ability to watch Youtube on the big screen in your living room, television’s dominance at the top of the advertising hierarchy is heavily threatened.
With the Smart Phone decimating our collective attention spans, we’re all guilty of having a cheeky scroll while the plot-line of our favourite TV show is interrupted by an ad break. This means TV advertising is becoming more passive than dynamic in its potency. Being the only Trad Media which is audio-visual and therefore multi-sensual, you do still have the benefit of stimulating the customers on two fronts, rather than one (Radio and Print).
Regarding the brand perception of TV advertising, if you’re on a major channel this overtly gives your brand a legitimacy that’s hard to replicate on other mediums, in terms of mass-market consciousness. Then there’s the fact the biggest brands in the country all use TV – particularly in large-audience sporting matches and the nightly news broadcasts – to create an affinity between an aspect of culture and thereby build familial trust in their product or service. Where they want to be is right in that living room environment with your family.
How television audience figures are actually compiled (ratings) is via an astoundingly small pool of TV-nuts who are paid a small fee to record their every session via a special remote control and metre unit. From this pool of well under 1000 punters in each of our capital cities, the ratings companies extrapolate out the supposed number of eyeballs for shows and sport matches, giving us audience figures to calculate reach and exposure. Again, bit of the dark arts. Pinch of salt too.
OUTDOOR ADVERTISING:
Billboards, Bus Stops, Branded Vehicles, Petrol Bowser Screens and even Banner-Pulling By-Planes all come under the annoying marketer’s acronym of OOH (Out-Of-Home) Advertising.
Billboards in particular are often very expensive but can be highly effective depending on the product or service. They trade off regular commutes, so the higher the flow of regular vehicle and pedestrian traffic, the more valuable the location.
Suburban Bus Stops are subject to regular vandalism and have small surface areas, yet can be used to great effect – see recent campaigns by Rusty or Linneys. For Bus Shelters – where it’s a portrait style screen about 2 metres by 1.5 metres – these can be used to even greater effect.
Petrol Bowser Advertising is universally irritating and should possibly be outlawed, permanently. Just don’t do it.
Branded Vehicles are a nice thought but as all Advertising trades off repetition (repetition breeds results) unless it’s seen multiple times by a target demographic, or has a hyper-strong call to action, it won’t work.
LETTERBOX DROPS:
The bane of many people’s existence, the ancient practice of snail mail doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. That’s partly due to the sheer scale of it and relatively cheap price point. Ask any successful Real Estate Agent - it does eventuate results.
The catch is be prepared for a lot of waste. Real Estate Agents will do a mass mailout of 1000 homes and if they get a handful of appraisals off the batch, they’ll consider it a success. If one appraisal out of five turns into a listing and that listing bags a $20,000 selling fee you can easily see how the flyer printing and distribution expenses pale into insignificance. Different of course with what you’re trying to market and what your messaging/creative entails.
Interested in the digital side of the equation?
Reach out and let’s continue the conversation — hello@sevenpatterns.com