I remember reading an article ten or so years ago about how House of Travel, one of New Zealand’s largest travel brands, was shifting 80% of their media budget into digital. It was particularly interesting to me given I’d worked on the brand previously, but even more interesting over the years as I feel like that moment has become a watershed in my mind marking the time where our industry took a dramatic shift.
So often nowadays clients come to me asking for someone to execute a solution rather than solve a problem, and more often that not that solution is some very specific form of digital. In the old days, a client might come to you and say “I make sausages, I want you to help me sell more of my sausages than someone else’s sausages”, whereas now that same sausage client might come to me and say “I need someone to run google display ads for my sausage company”, see the difference?
The problem is that Google Display ads are probably not that effective at selling sausages. If we go back to the House of Travel example there’s a very legitimate reason that a travel company should want to shift their advertising online. At the time, travel agents were a dying breed. The airlines themselves sold plane tickets direct to public, hotels and resorts marketed their own discount packages, rental car companies were easy to book. There was an enormous shift in consumer behaviour where our parents' generation likely had a travel agent book their holiday for them, where now we were booking everything online.
Someone once asked me what I thought the most powerful form of media was, and I told them “whatever media reaches your audience at the closest place to their decision making”. House of Travel running ads online is an excellent solution, because people buy flights online. Most of what they sold was a relatively simple purchasing decision, “I want to go to London, I need to buy flights to London on these dates”, and for the more complex decisions of “I want to find somewhere warm to holiday in July”, they could still supply a lot of that information through their website
However, as much as apps like Milkrun and Uber Eats are changing our purchasing habits, for the most part people still buy sausages from a big building full of all their other grocery needs. Trying to market sausages (or cereal, or ice cream, or virtually any FMCG product) solely through online banner advertising is a fools errand
Digital is a tool (or rather a set of tools). It’s a fantastic tool for a lot of jobs, but it’s still a tool. In advertising we’re asked to solve different problems and finding the right tool for the job is a big piece of what makes the advice we provide valuable. Digital, for example, can be excellent at solving direct response problems such as reaching people trying to buy flights online and selling them flights. Maybe recently you were in the market for some new boots, you’d looked at boots online and now all of a sudden you’re being served ads for boots. You see a banner ad with a pair of boots you like, and they’re marked down to an affordable price, so you buy them. Great job banner advertising.
What research shows us however is that digital banner advertising and search are not particularly good at solving brand equity problems. Let’s say you are Karma Cola for example, and you want to develop brand equity so that the next time someone is standing in front of a fridge in their local BP station trying to decide which tasty cold beverage to reach for they remember you, digital is highly unlikely to solve this problem for you. You need outdoor, in-store, TV, not banner advertising
Digital is starting to reach into some of these channels (see our article on programmatic advertising), however Digital Video On Demand or Digital Out of Home are more akin to traditional channels than they are to Google Display Network
Our agency was borne out of a digital specialty, and though we’re a bit more agnostic to our media nowadays I’d still argue our expertise in digital against anyone else’s. The thing that makes us especially skilled as a partner for your digital needs is we know when to tell you not to use digital and when we should be using something else.
