A common perception I often encounter is the belief that people don’t watch television anymore. Perhaps, if someone could take their TV off their wall and come in and put it on your counter, then maybe the true power of television would be realized!

It is easy to become mesmerized by the attribution that targeted marketing offers, but it is important to continue to have a presence on your local broadcast stations. Community outreach is as important a part of advertising as anything else. Ingraining yourself in your local community provides familiarity and credibility and that is, as the old credit cards ads say, priceless…and by the way…that’s a TV ad I am remembering from all those years ago.

I’ve had clients ask what I mean when I say broadcast television. When we are talking about broadcast television, we are talking about major local affiliates, such as CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX. It’s important to realize that when consumers are cutting the cord, they are parting ways with their cable provider and moving to streaming cable services such as YouTubeTV that include the local affiliates. Meaning that the “cord cutting craze” has not changed the number of households receiving the local channels. Every house with a television receives the local channels.

The way consumers view television is more fragmented than ever. That is undeniable. However, while television advertising may not start and stop with broadcast television any longer, it remains a powerful form of advertising, and your marketing campaigns should start and end with some sort of video marketing. But, for the sake of this article we are going to focus on why broadcast television is still powerful.

When bought properly, television advertising is purchased through an efficiency model that has been in place for decades. I started in the industry in 1998, and television is bought with the same efficiency model today that it was in the 90’s. We use our resources to plan a media buy that reaches your core audience at an industry leading low Cost Per Point (CPP). Meaning we obtain lower rates for our clients than anyone else in the market. And we do so at the same CPPs year after year – meaning we are paying the same rates now as we were decades ago.

Some may have been led to believe that the rates keep going up and the audience keeps dropping, but television isn’t the newspaper and inflation is not a factor in how we buy. The audience is not shrinking for our clients because we continue to buy the same amount of rating points at the same price year after year. Your dollar is going just as far as it ever was.

We also include value-added bonus exposure with every one of our media buys, such as bonus commercials and promotional sponsorships. In addition to value-added, we do a Post Buy Analysis for every media buy, which is an audit of your schedule to ensure the stations deliver the rating points we were promised. If they happen to underdeliver, we then place a bonus schedule making up the rating points underachieved.

That is why it is important to choose an agency that invests in the proper media buying tools, such as subscriptions to rating services and media buying software, that enable the agency to choose the programming best suited for the client to maximize reach and frequency to your target audience. We use our buying power and market knowledge to negotiate the best prices. Remember that when you buy directly, you are buying the station’s rates. And if you are working with an agency that isn’t showing you reach and frequency in advance of booking a schedule, including value added promotional opportunities, or analyzing your schedule after placement for optimal performance, you may want to do your own marketing audit.

Please see the graphic below to learn more about our Media Buying Process.

When we begin working with new clients not only do we discover that we can provide them with lower unit rates than they are currently obtaining, but also advertisers often have dollars allocated to various digital initiatives or promotions that they did not know they were participating in. Station reps get paid significantly higher commission rates on digital, so it is a very common procedure to move local direct dollars from spot buys to digital after the order is placed. It’s worth asking if they could discount your rates after the buy, why didn’t they do that upfront and get you a bigger bang for your buck (more commercials)?  

Even with all these details taken into consideration when planning a TV campaign, we do need to circle back to the fragmented nature of how viewers consume their television in the modern era. There should be a balance between broadcast TV and targeted streaming television, referred to as OTT (Over the Top). Purchasing OTT impressions to compliment your broadcast television buy is something we recommend to all television advertisers. OTT is targeted and serves the same television ads you run on regular broadcast television to consumers whose online behaviors have indicated they are in the market for your product.

It's also very important to acknowledge that due to the changing way consumers view television, we have integrated modern strategies for buying broadcast television. While the focus will always be on efficiency, gone are the days of stripping local newscasts and syndicated programs. In most instances, our television buys are going to focus heavily on Primetime network shows and LIVE sporting events with an appropriate amount of news and other key programming mixed in at time periods that we have found to attract routine viewership.

An additional concept that I developed is something I refer to as “media overflow.” The great thing about television is that when you choose programming that does well with your core consumer, you also are going to reach consumers that are outside your target audience. Most businesses clientele have a primary age range, but that does not mean that ALL your customers are confined within that demographic. And the same is true with a television audience. Any given program will have a wide variance of viewership. So, we efficiently buy the programs that perform well in reaching your target audience, but also acquire a residual audience at the same time. That is media overflow!

When planning a marketing campaign, our ultimate goal is to utilize a media mix that consistently exposes your message to consumers across multiple platforms. We do so by producing creative ads that are consistent across all media, so that when somebody sees you on social media or hears you on the radio, it resonates as the same message they saw on television. Consistency can mean marketing the same sales promotion or using the same voice talent or music on every platform, so a consumer can easily identify the message as yours.

At the end of the day, until our multiplatform customers stop telling us “TV still brings us our largest sales,” we are still going to recommend that you take advantage of the SIGHT, SOUND, MOTION, EMOTION and COLOR that television provides.

If you would like to learn more about TV or a multiplatform marketing campaign, please reach out to set up an in-depth meeting about all our marketing capabilities.

Jeff Heiniger

President

Ad Lab Advertising & Marketing

Ad Lab Social

TV ads are trusted more than other types of advertising.

Ad Lab is a market leader in media placement, specializing in digital, TV, radio, social media, print, and outdoor. Deemed “The Everything Agency” in an October 2019 story by Business People, Ad Lab offers award-winning in-house production for TV, digital, and radio production, graphic design for digital and print, and all specialty items.