Major Advertisers Shifting Dollars from Digital to TV

JP Morgan Chase is retreating on its digital ad placements. Instead, they will take dollars and move them back to television.

That’s big news in advertising circle. The company has a $5 billion marketing budget. Perhaps it’s the logical outcome for the company that reduced their digital reach by more than 98% last year (reducing placement from 400,000 websites to 5,000) and saw no change in outcomes.

“We’ve retreated a little bit from an all-in digital strategy and we have gone back to TV a bit. Because people are watching are live sports or live events. And you still can get a fair amount of value. All of our models still show that the kind of TV that we’re doing is working and I think because of what’s happened in digital and the awareness that most marketers have realized how their dollars can go awry, you have a flight back to quality — quality digital as well. — JPMorgan Chase CMO Kristin Lemkau to Business Insider.

Lemkau said they are primarily focusing on live sports and live events. She said digital these days in “not the for the faint of heart.” The metrics, Lemkau, describes as “funky” and points to problems with fraud, viewability, and brand safety.

Read more from her in-depth interview at Business Insider.

They’re Not Alone

JP Morgan Chase isn’t alone in this. The world’s largest advertiser, P&G, cut out $140 million in digital ad spend last year — and increased sales.

Procter & Gamble announced they cut digital advertising spend in 2017 by a whopping $200 million dollars. Halfway through last year, they had announced $140 million in cuts due to brand safety concerns: things like bot clicks and questionable websites showing up in their ad network buys. They continued the rest of the year.

What did they do with the money? Reinvested in areas with media reach, including TV. Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard said the trend will continue. The result, Pritchard said, by going back to traditional media increased the reach by 10% and cut 20% of its ineffective marketing.

50% Plan To Shift To TV

A recent UBS study analyzed planning on more than $40 billion of combined advertising spend across businesses. 50% said they are planning to shift dollars from digital to TV in the next two years. 11% said they were planning a major shift. To be fair, the other half said they are moving dollars towards digital.

Clients cited four key components in the UBS study for the increased TV spend:

• Reach
• Brand Awareness
• Content Environment
• ROI

H/T MediaPost, UBS, Business Insider, Spots N Dots