How to develop an effective multichannel advertising strategy
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This paper explains how brands can engage with consumers in a complex media landscape, arguing that they need to stay rooted in the real lives of their consumers.
Multichannel strategies should consider any media context through which the target audience can be reached and find the best route for the most compelling content.
Brands need to consider what the media will contribute to engaging and reaching the target audience, how much will need to be spent for it to be effective and how the media contributes to the advertising, both in isolation and in the mix.
Multichannel strategies need to maintain clarity around the task and target audience in relation to brand growth, and be media neutral in opportunity evaluation.
Consumers use a mix of media so brands should as well, but they need to be able to evaluate the success of their multichannel strategies through a balanced scorecard.
Case studies include brands such as John Lewis, Bolthouse Farms, Antarctica Beer and Sixt.
Engaging with consumers in a complex media landscape is hard, especially when the map is constantly changing. It is vital for marketers to be well-informed, in a media neutral way, about the media choices available to reach their audiences, for their purposes. Staying rooted in the real lives of their consumers provides "True North" for navigating the shifting landscape.
Definitions
A multichannel advertising strategy should consider any media context through which a brand can reach their target audience with their communications. The aim is to find the best route to the target consumer, to deliver the most compelling content in the most effective way to meet the advertising goals. This should elicit the
highest return on investment per the advertising goals and budget, which in turn should contribute to brand growth or other business outcomes.
Where to start
"Advertising" has expanded to encompass all sorts of communications content including native advertising, customised content, sponsored content, brand journalism, owned media or branded content, all delivered in various forms e.g. video, audio, static, rich, interactive and experiential.
Media contexts have multiplied to offer wide range of audience experiences, from an ephemeral-but-interactive Snapchat moment to a leisurely read in the bath with a favourite magazine or a warmly anticipated night out at the cinema. "Advertising campaigns" have been superseded by "brand connections ecosystems" where managed communications sit alongside every consumer touchpoint that could influence consumers towards the marketing goals.
Online media have gone from poster child to naughty child, with audience measurement and environmental concerns emerging for advertisers. The prevalence of data-driven "performance" campaigns and metrics such as website clicks, CPMs, CTRs and conversions have distracted from how emotional relationships can drive longer term behavioural changes and brand growth (especially through premium pricing).
Best practice perspectives are now readjusting to a more media neutral and holistic stance; almost all traditional channels are online now, and can offer multifaceted ways to engage consumers. Savvy agencies and media owners have been marshalling digital data along with other data sources into data "lakes" that will also breathe life into brand campaigns. They will be fished for general consumer insights; attitudinal data will be modelled into and out of these lakes to support digital brand building campaigns and media owners will be able to better synchronise their platforms to deliver clever content partnerships and audience packages to advertisers.
Essentials
Never has there been a greater need for your own compass to navigate the complex channel planning landscape, the following steps will provide some bearings.
- Capabilities checklist for channel choice
Every new advertising campaign should start with a media neutral evaluation of all opportunities per its objectives, but this happens less often than it should. Plans can be influenced by client risk aversion, fixation on following their competition and industry headlines. Time pressed planners can rely on heuristics and averages which could be limiting; "bubble thinking" mistakes planners’ media lives with the real target consumer, and overreliance on media consumption averages can hide the variety of opportunities within each media. For example, Newspapers may not be top of mind as a place for fashion brands, but the Style section of the Sunday Times might be more than fit for purpose.
The following checklist outlines the minimum requirements for evaluating media choices, if not for every plan, at least on a regular basis as a strategic review for the client’s own circumstances.
- What the media will contribute to engaging and reaching your target audience.
Can it reach enough of your target audience in the time scale required?
What level of affinity does it hold with your target audience?
Can it provide receptive contexts for your content?
- How much you will need to spend to use this media effectively.
Can you afford the required scale?
Can you cut through the noise in this channel cost effectively?
What is the cost to adapt your content to resonate best in that context?
- How that media can contribute alone and within the mix to the advertising task.
How will it help build target audience reach and frequency during the campaign?
What role will it play to deliver the required depth and longevity of engagement?
- Put the Receiver at the heart of your model
Despite turning 60 years old, the simple Sender, Message, Channel, Receiver model is still valid because it highlights the "Receiver", as the alpha and omega of effectiveness. Their predisposition towards, and interaction with, the sender, message and the channel will greatly impact their response and the techniques and tactics to deploy. This should be top of mind in a highly interactive communications world, with many techniques and tactics in play and lots of "interference" such as advertising clutter and busy lives.
Greater initial predisposition towards the "Sender" or the "Message" makes the advertising task easier because of an increased alertness and openness to messaging. The tougher the task in this sense, the more depth of communication, emotional impact, persuasion and media weight will be required.
The "Message" is both what is being said and the creative way it is done; for brand building ideally via a potent creative idea or "story" that works across media. The channel planner then seeks the most powerful ways to connect that story with the desired consumers. Creative testing should help it work best within every media context, as well as across the whole campaign. The audience will be experiencing it in various places at various times, potentially in a different order to plan and it is vital to avoid fragmented messages and associations and wasted exposures. Connecting to people in a coherent way with compelling content may encourage the audience become a medium themselves, amplifying the brand through participation and sharing (see Bolthouse Farms case study below).
The "Channel" - i.e. media - is more than a distribution machine for serving advertising impressions. Every time a person is reached there is a tangible receiver experience, flavoured by the context of the media moment, which will impact their receptivity to the brand’s advertising. For example, online intent based targeting may be good at converting the highly disposed, but as Millward Brown’s 2016 study "Adreaction: Video creative in a digital world" showed, it can upset the wider consumer base; far better to leverage these people’s general interests, which they are happy to be targeted on.
Ultimately "interference" must be surmounted, not by shouting louder or more often but through highly creative experiences, in the right places and times, in the right context, to the right target audience.
- Clarify the advertising task and target audience
The "Sender" in the above model, is the brand, focussed on achieving a specific response from specific people. Being clear on the advertising task and target audience is essential, but unfortunately, advertising briefs are
often vague or state objectives which are not fully considered in relation to brand growth. This makes it difficult to plan effectively and evaluate later.
Marketing consultant Peter Field and Les Binet, head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB give general advice on setting the advertising task, drawn from the IPA’s databank of effectiveness case histories. To be successful per a bigger brand building picture, the advertising task should be to:
- Talk to the whole category with high reach campaigns. To drive salience, fame and share of voice. This will increase penetration, trial and price premium.
- Have activation targets linked to the above with a 60:40 ratio of brand building versus activation activities.
- Deliver high creativity and an emotional connection with the audience. High creativity is ten times more efficient than low creativity and emotional connections are more powerful even in "rational" categories to build brand momentum over time.
This said, effectiveness awards around the world demonstrate a range of growth driving approaches (see case studies below) and the advertising task is ultimately all about what will deliver your marketing objectives, and your brands growth, in your circumstances.
The target audience should be whoever drives the highest potential for the brand or whoever is most strategically important. You need to a clear description to work from, and know how tightly you want to target. Online "intent" targeting intercepts people when they have shown behavioural signs of being "in market", certain media vehicles may offer a deep focus on and affinity with style conscious men; whilst both may be exactly right for your objectives, they ignore a wider audience which may be important to brand growth. In this case, broader-based media "wastage" may be acceptable.
- Let your consumers guide your channel thinking
Done well, channel planning starts from a deep and unbiased understanding of the target consumer’s media choices, what they do and how they feel when they are doing it. The aim is to spot potent opportunities to leverage the audience relationships of different media contexts e.g. programmes, titles, sections, editorial topics, locations, dwell times, and so on. For example, outdoor advertising can exploit long waits at bus stops as much as large posters on driving routes; and contextually rich and trusted newspaper environments online are quite different to those offered by aggregated content sites.
Knowing how your consumers are connecting with your competitors is important, but more to seek out competitor weaknesses to attack, or to find an opportunity they have not yet discovered. Whilst you are competing within your category, you are also competing with the general noise and distractions of people’s day to day lives, trying to find the right moment to talk.
It is always a good idea to talk to your target consumers and find out what they are noticing and appreciating.
- Study best practice but avoid limiting thinking
When it comes to suitability for different advertising tasks, there are many case studies and meta-analysis to look at. Analysis of the IPA effectiveness databank published in "Marketing in the Digital Age" by Binet and Field provides some general pointers on effective media choices:
Mass reach channels still deliver much bigger business results than newer digital channels (because penetration is key to growth). Whilst a campaign without TV can still deliver 1.1% uplift in market share, TV campaigns add 2.6% uplift. Generally adding TV to the mix boosts effectiveness by 40% - a bigger impact than any other medium. Outdoor also delivers major scale to advertisers with a 15% uplift in effectiveness for adding traditional outdoor to the mix (37% when outdoor with digital is used).
Earned and owned media are not a replacement for paid media, but instead act as important supplement to it. Unpaid media alone adds 0.9% market share growth versus paid media 2.6%. But adding owned media to the mix increases the business effects of a paid campaign by 13% and adding earned media (branded content) increases them by 26%.
Generally, the internet is making all mass media more effective because it adds a new activation medium, but also it amplifies brand-building effects. TV and online video work better together to deliver a 54% increase in the number of very large business effects. TV-only delivers 32%.
However, examples from around the world show there is no one size fits all approach and that effective campaigns are complex and integrated. For example, IPA shortlisted campaigns used online video and PR to amplify messaging and top-rated entries were also more likely to use traditional media e.g. magazines, newspapers and radio in the mix, with these channels working alongside digital media.
General heuristics can be too limiting. For example, whilst response-led objectives might favour media "staples" such as newspapers and online display, adding TV and online video may supercharge response. Equally a brand building campaign may favour high reach or video media to drive salience, fame and share of voice among the whole category, however it should not preclude media that can multiply the effect, deliver associations like "trust" or drive the activation elements. Media owners provide numerous case studies which demonstrate, quite rightly, their adaptability to more tasks than might normally be assumed.
- Maximise the mix
All brands should consider combining multiple channels and evidence suggests that this applies to all sectors, all audiences and all objectives. Consumers use a mix and so should you.
Multi-media increases reach and opportunities to see. Whilst it is important to spend enough in each media for them to deliver an effect, all media have a diminishing reach curve where additional spend achieves less incremental reach and perhaps wasteful frequency. Better then, to add another media than keep spending in the same channel.
Multi-media can play complementary and synergistic roles. For example, in campaigns where you face a persuasion task, it may be to magnify and deepen the messaging i.e. helping to say the same thing more often, in different ways, at about the same time. In campaigns that are more about awareness or familiarity the role may be to extend reach or longevity.
Multi-media delivers the message in a range of ways, in different moments and contexts. All of this adds up to a greater chance of audience receptivity, response and budget efficiency
- Evaluating multichannel advertising strategies
When planning a strategy, it is always important to check back on any previous effectiveness research for the brand. It is equally important to step into the shoes of the consumer and consider how they will feel and react as the receiver.
Measuring campaign effectiveness is a matter of clarifying the advertising objectives and then drawing together
the required data and analytic resources to work out both the returns and the drivers of those returns.
Considering the time frame is important to determine ROI fairly for different product categories and tasks.
A macro view of the whole campaign may or may not use the same data, or depth of data and analytics that would be needed look at the role of the individual elements in driving that overall outcome. Econometric analysis of aggregated data streams may be enough to give a campaign level view, and it can often split higher reach media relatively easily, but more granularity will be needed to inform decisions across a fuller mix or long tail of connections.
To disentangle a more complex mix, one needs first to have a good estimate of whether people were exposed to the individual advertising elements and then a robust way to link that exposure to desired changes in attitudes or behaviours, separating out the brand predisposition inherent in the audience profile of each media (which is how suitably targeted media can command a price premium).
Different elements of a campaign may have their own success measures, which should be accommodated to ensure they are implemented correctly. It might be that sharing or liking or dwell time or scroll depth, or organic search visibility are important indicators of the emotional value of branded content and will help identify which pieces of content within that channel deserve more investment and amplification than others.
Silos exist because specialism is needed to optimise within them and this may mean specific metrics. This is ok if there is a firm - level playing field - grasp on the integrated picture. And ideally these silo metrics and campaign metrics need to link firmly to brand value growth.
A balanced scorecard seems the best route forward to encompass a range of measurement that can provide the big integrated picture, plus cater for a range of activities. Four areas to investigate are Audience (campaign and content reach and targeting), Engagement (how the campaign and content are being received), Attitude change (towards the Brand or Idea e.g. this brand is worth the premium, dirt is good) and Behaviour change (e.g. changing eating habits, going into a showroom).
Reminder checklist
Ultimately, an effective multichannel advertising strategy requires:
- Media neutral understanding of capabilities specific to client
- Clarity around task and target audience in relation to brand growth
- Working with people’s real media lives and their advertising receptivity
- Maximising opportunities in each channel to reach and engage
- Maximising the power of a multi-media mix
- Evaluating with a balanced scorecard
Case studies
John Lewis: Monty's Christmas, Cannes Creative Lions, Grand Prix, Creative Effectiveness Lions, 2016
John Lewis, had messaging based around a television ad each year, but was also praised by judges for the range of complementary media (social, digital, OOH, online, PR and POS ads) that increased in volume each
year to create an immersive experience with smart phasing used to create maximum impact. Thus, John Lewis has registered an increase in sales of 33% over the past four years, as well as a market share increase to 29.6% and an ROI of £8 for every £1 spent.
Bolthouse Farms: Broccoli's image makeover, Effie Worldwide, Finalist, North America Effies, 2015
Bolthouse Farms, repositioned broccoli in the US by hijacking the popularity of another vegetable - kale - with an 'eat fad free' message. A partnership with the New York Times Magazine made broccoli the cover story, spearheaded further news media picking up the story. PR continued with radio shows, features on an airline’s pre-roll and YouTube parodies. Overall 395 million PR impressions were earned. Broccoli consumption increased 23% (versus 5% target).
Antarctica Beer and The World's Best Social Network, The WARC Media Awards, Bronze, Effective
Channel Integration, 2016, Brazil
Antarctica, a beer brand, rebuilt its carnival connection with people in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Previously it has offered practical help like toilets and free transport but had achieved no emotional connection. Research showed a conflict between people wanting WiFi internet to be provided and yet feeling they were not "in the moment". Bravely Antarctica opted to build a multi-media campaign encouraging people to put down their phones and "value things that truly matter", consistent with the brand's purpose of inspiring people to live in an easy going way. The result was greater spontaneous awareness, brand consideration and relevance.
How Sixt challenged car hire culture and changed its fortunes, Oliver Pople and Rachel Walker, Institute
of Practitioners in Advertising, Silver, IPA Effectiveness Awards, 2016
Sixt, a car rental service, used a highly-localised campaign to increase market growth. The creative route was to celebrate the swagger you feel when you drive a premium car, by taking over a large London Tube station mostly used by affluent young professionals who don't own a car. The brand covered the station in OOH ads, while print, digital and social allowed for higher audience engagement and content dissemination. The brand became the first brand mentioned by 21% people who passed through Canary Wharf and Sixt's London revenue grew by +52%.
