Will It Be A Holly Jolly Christmas For Your Brand?
Put a jingle in your bell this year by tracking and optimising your Christmas TV advertising.
It’s that time of the year: When marketers are scrambling to get their Christmas season media plans finalised, when big budgets are being spent on television advertising and everyone (CMOs in particular) just hopes it will bring in the sales. When so much time and effort is being spent on choosing the product mix and tweaking the TV spots in the hope that it will bring in the desired results. When John Lewis is apparently paying Elton John £5m to appear in their Christmas ad while Marks & Spencer hires boy band Take That for theirs….
But is anyone looking at the results of last year’s Christmas advertising before spending a fortune again this year? How much sales did last year’s TV ads generate? Which channels worked and which didn’t? What time of the day delivered the best results? The answer is most likely ‘no’ – because brands in South Africa are not using attribution software to track and optimise their TV advertising yet.
The statistics are somewhat sillier than the silly season itself. Over the last four years, South African brands spent on average 33% more on TV advertising during November and December than in the beginning of the year – without being able to accurately attribute sales generated by these increased budgets.
According to Irina Herf, General Manager of DCMN South Africa, brands should employ tracking technology to track and optimise the performance of their campaigns to make sure they know exactly which creative, which channels, and which days and day parts are performing the best for them and delivering the required results.
Herf said: “By tracking and attributing their television advertising, brands will be able to plan an even better campaign next year and motivate for the required budget based on actual results. Or, if they start advertising early this year, they can even adapt their media plans month by month until December.”
But Herf cautioned brands to not confuse exactly what performance they should be tracking. “In South Africa, brands are used to tracking the performance of their campaigns through general post-campaign analysis based on reach, frequency, GRP, etc. This means they track the performance of the media used. At DCMN, we refer to the client’s performance when we track and optimise campaigns, not the media’s performance. So we track how many website visits, bookings, sales, registrations or downloads the brand received as a direct result of their offline (TV and radio) advertising. Media performance is still crucial to ensure broad brand awareness but the tracking that we do through our TV attribution software is what shows the real impact of the ads on the client’s business,” she said.
“Locally and internationally there is usually a lot of focus on creating truly memorable ads around Christmas. And although a well-thought-out ad that really touches the audience will go a long way in establishing brand awareness and even brand loyalty, an ad cannot be judged only on its ‘feel good factor’ – it needs to perform. And it’s important for brands to be able to measure that performance,” Herf concluded.
She also reiterated that brands should apply the same reasoning to their Black Friday advertising and not miss the opportunity to see exactly what percentage of their sales can be attributed to offline advertising.
To start tracking your offline Black Friday and Christmas advertising, DCMN’s TV attribution software, DC Analytics, is free to use and can be downloaded on www.dcanalytics.com. The DCMN team can assist with analysing the data and making recommendations based on the data.
The content in this article has been provided by Irina Herf, General Manager of DCMN South Africa – the growth marketing partner for digital businesses and start-ups. The company’s holistic, data-driven approach combines technology with expert knowledge to grow the market leaders of tomorrow. Independent and owner-operated, DCMN was launched in 2010 by Andreas Dengler and Matthias Riedl. To date, the company has helped more than 180 digital brands worldwide to scale their businesses.
For more information, contact:
Website: https://www.dcmn.com/
Tel: 083 657 1618
Email: howzit@dcmn.co.za
