I started off in Brand Management at P&G (the worlds’ biggest advertiser) and have been in the tech world for ~15 years. I am glad to see that we have started to talk about TV advertising. I have been meaning to write something around this for ages — but didn’t. However, Rob’s excellent post (love statistics in marketing) inspired me to vent a bit.
The biggest crime committed is that marketing is separated from marketing research (at least at my B-school) and it appears as an after thought. Heuristically, I would say marketing is 60–70% research (market, consumer, focus groups, questionnaires, face-to-face, etc.), 10–20% execution, and the rest is post-implementation research (again) and tweaking. I would disagree with the tagline that TV numbers are unmeasurable — the industry has been around for more than half a century and things are being measured (maybe not actioned upon).
When done correctly — you can actually tell what the impact of the TV spot will be BEFORE it is aired, or it is not aired and we save the media spend. From my experience the following are generally issues with TV ads:
- Unsure of audience.
- Unclear objective (so what do you want the audience to do?). There is no creative insight.
- Unclear (off-brand/character) message.
That’s enough venting for now ☺
