Media Planning Matters
TiVo announced this week that the most popular TiVo Stop|Watched advertisements were from Cort Furniture Rental, Domincan Republic Travel Bureau and Bowflex (http://www.businessweek.com/brandnewday/). According to BusinessWeek, these ads were very clearly selling a product and often with an 800 number as well. And the reason they succeeded was they were placed exactly with the content that attracted their audience. Media planning and campaign message were perfectly aligned to get results.
Adify sees the same trend as TiVo playing out on our expert vertical ad networks – ads that are built for a specific audience and placed on a vertical ad network that specifically caters to that audience easily outperform industry averages.
For example, one advertiser is running a specialty dog food campaign on a vertical ad network for passionate dog lovers, breeders and their vets. The creative speaks to the dog professional and the media planning leveraged the expertise of one of Adify’s Network Builders – a dog expert. The CTR is more than 3x the industry average. Another advertiser is running a more generic campaign that they placed in a custom-aggregated back to school channel that leverages multiple Adify networks. That campaign is performing because of the expert vertical ad networks – it would soar with creative that matched the audience.
Research announced this week challenged the focus on clicks and emphasized that brand advertisers need to measure the advertisement's effectiveness by measuring the impression it made on the viewer. Andrew Shrock captures this discussion on Technology Review. For an advertisement to make an impression - it must clearly have a compelling message for the audience congregating on the media where it run.
The continued fragmentation of the audience presents a challenge to advertisers –advertisers (and their agencies) have to offer creative that speaks to narrower audience interests while buying media to access that specific audience. The ads don’t have to be dynamically generated – knowing and talking to your audience is key in a fragmented media universe. Fragmentation forces media companies and advertisers to take our game to the next level with compelling creative and innovative media planning since the days of the audience aggregating on 3 TV channels or 4-6 web sites are long past.