For the majority of my media career both advertisers and agencies accepted that the price of media rose inexorably each year, sometimes at the inflation rate of a small South American country.
But since the twin influences of rampant increase in supply with digitalisation of media and the slowdown in total ad spend, growth since the credit crunch has seen effective deflation in media prices for the last few years. To paraphrase “you have never had it so cheap” … or at least not for more than a decade.
But there is one notable exception to this - and that’s the price of search. Here inflation is not only alive and well, but running at rates seen in the Weimar Republic.
Why do we, collectively as an industry, allow ourselves to pay more and more for what is essentially a coupon?
Search facilitates, it adds no value. It owns no content, it creates no reach of its own, it merely facilitates a journey that is started with engagement with a “proper” media channel. It also creates little long-term value for marketers - just look at the loyalty of customers who come to you via search vs those from other channels.
Yet we divert more and more money from channels our customers spend hours with rather than seconds with. Why?
The advertising and marketing community has the creative talents that can match those showcased in the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. Surely we can harness some of that creativity to find ways to better value each stage in the journey, and invest appropriately?
Mike Colling, Managing Director
Wednesday 15 August 2012
Wednesday 8 August 2012
Olympic results - a game of two halves
Avid readers of this blog (all of you!) will know that I have been a little obsessed with warning that immediate response to media activity would be severely depressed by the Olympics.
“The world will be out to party” was how I referred to it back in May!
Well, with the typical smugness that accompanies “I told you so”, “I told you so”!
The majority of clients still using mass media to recruit mass audience customers have seen a fall in response of between 30% and 50% over the last week.
Hooray! We can still predict accurately.
What’s really interesting though is that this is a game of two halves. Olympic fever is much more pronounced in London and the South East than in the North and Scotland.
And the impact is seen much more on offline than online media. So much so that we are seeing search results improve (albeit marginally) week on week in the North and Scotland whilst declining by 20%+ in London
Even with TV audiences in the 20 million bracket this is clearly not an evenly distributed madness. It appears that London is the kitchen of this particular party!
Mike Colling
Managing Director
“The world will be out to party” was how I referred to it back in May!
Well, with the typical smugness that accompanies “I told you so”, “I told you so”!
The majority of clients still using mass media to recruit mass audience customers have seen a fall in response of between 30% and 50% over the last week.
Hooray! We can still predict accurately.
What’s really interesting though is that this is a game of two halves. Olympic fever is much more pronounced in London and the South East than in the North and Scotland.
And the impact is seen much more on offline than online media. So much so that we are seeing search results improve (albeit marginally) week on week in the North and Scotland whilst declining by 20%+ in London
Even with TV audiences in the 20 million bracket this is clearly not an evenly distributed madness. It appears that London is the kitchen of this particular party!
Mike Colling
Managing Director
Wednesday 1 August 2012
Back to the 70’s for TV viewing
This weekend’s TV viewing figures are really quite remarkable. Friday night’s BBC1 peak audience to the Danny Boyle show of 26.9 million viewers has been well documented, as has the 82% share of audience.
These figures are comparable to Sunday night at the London Palladium figures back in the day, when a single show could capture the attention of a nation.
Friday shows that with enough creativity that feat can still be replicated. Interesting food for thought for an investment case for content?
What is possibly more interesting is that BBC1 sustained an Olympic audience across the weekend. Not at an 80% share, but across Saturday and Sunday evenings approaching a 40% share, more than double their previous week’s total audience share of 19%.
Total viewing is up a little, but not a lot; most of these viewers have been stolen from other channels, not other places. And most of the theft seems to have been from other “terrestrial” channels not from the long, long tail of multichannel TV.
That tells us one of two things. Either that the satellite audience is so engaged with its 115th repeat of Friends that they refuse to give it up, even for Rebecca Adlington, or that they are so non-engaged with their televisions that it matters not what channel they are tuned to.
Given the response rates we see from our long tail I wonder which of these scenarios might be true?
Mike Colling
Managing Director
These figures are comparable to Sunday night at the London Palladium figures back in the day, when a single show could capture the attention of a nation.
Friday shows that with enough creativity that feat can still be replicated. Interesting food for thought for an investment case for content?
What is possibly more interesting is that BBC1 sustained an Olympic audience across the weekend. Not at an 80% share, but across Saturday and Sunday evenings approaching a 40% share, more than double their previous week’s total audience share of 19%.
Total viewing is up a little, but not a lot; most of these viewers have been stolen from other channels, not other places. And most of the theft seems to have been from other “terrestrial” channels not from the long, long tail of multichannel TV.
That tells us one of two things. Either that the satellite audience is so engaged with its 115th repeat of Friends that they refuse to give it up, even for Rebecca Adlington, or that they are so non-engaged with their televisions that it matters not what channel they are tuned to.
Given the response rates we see from our long tail I wonder which of these scenarios might be true?
Mike Colling
Managing Director
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