Author: Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, CEO
Original Link: 60 Second Marketer
Date Published: March 21, 2017
An overlooked advertising channel that still produces results is TV. It continues to be a medium that can sell products directly to targeted consumers while lifting the perceptions about the overall brand.
It’s relevant even in light of the fragmentation, and marketers should include strategic TV placements as part of their overall campaign.
For the context of this topic, “brand lift” is a positive increase in how audiences view a company and how often they think about it – a measure of “stickiness.”
The need for this lift is important for many brands, especially housewares makers and other companies that produce broad lines of interconnected products. Marketers at these firms need assurances that campaigns are not only boosting sales of “Product XYZ” but also giving the audiences positive feelings about the brand itself and its other products.
As marketers expand their focus and metrics behind increasing sales for just one product, they can better gauge the true ROI and impacts of a campaign. And armed with this information they can then dynamically adjust future campaign creatives and placements in order to better increase brand lift metrics.
Measuring the Brand Lift
How an audience thinks about a company, and how often those thoughts occur are the critical components of brand sentiment. Generating a “brand lift” means increasing the positivity and frequency of audience thoughts.
Marketers that are promoting specific products must also provide content and experiences that boost the brand as a whole. This is especially important for brands such as housewares makers that offer a wide range of products and present brand attributes of reliability, quality, or reasonable pricing.
Creating a brand lift is important, but measuring it can be a challenge.
Big players such as Nielsen are taking note of the need for metrics, as the company recently launched its Digital Brand Effect that measures “brand lift by placement metrics.” The metric offers detailed reporting that correlates ad placements and site performance.
According to Aleck Schleider, author of Getting Back to Basics: Why Brand Lift Measurement Will Never Go Out of Fashion “In today’s market, getting a consumer to buy something is not easy, but in most cases it will always start with raising awareness for a product, which — eventually through frequency and messaging — drives intent.”
The quote sums up the need for advertising through channels that can achieve both the branding and sales-oriented goals.
Engaging with TV Campaigns
Measuring brand lift entails gauging audience sentiment and intentions. How likely are they to recommend the product to friends? Are they satisfied with their interactions with the brand? It’s tricky to measure this engagement and then relate it to increases in sales.
TV is an ideal channel that marketers can use to measurably improve overall branding scores while also driving sales of specific products. Television allows for creative branding opportunities and targeted content, and campaigns with the strongest creative will be able to influence sales across the company’s product line.
George Leon, senior vice president of media and account management at Los Angeles-based Hawthorne Direct describes the benefits of well executed creative, saying “In essence, consumers are responding to a creative for a single product being tagged to specific retailers. But, they are engaging with a marketer across all products at all tagged retailers.”
His point means brands must include messaging and content that talks about their broader brand and measure the impact that campaigns focused on “Product X” can have on all of the other products in the catalog.
TV campaigns should remain in marketer’s toolkits for 2017 and the coming years, even with all of the available digital video outlets and the rise of mobile. Targeted TV ads presented with the right media mix and frequency provide marketers with a rare one-two punch of both raising product and brand awareness.
About the Author: Jessica Hawthorne-Castro is the CEO of Hawthorne, an award-winning technology-based advertising agency specializing in analytics and accountable brand campaigns for over 30-years.
