Marketing a shop, a chain or a shopping centre means being judged on something very simple, which is whether more people came through the door. You’re up against online prices, the weather and every other retailer’s sale, and you usually find out within days whether your advertising has worked, because if the advert goes out on Thursday and you’re busier on Saturday, you know.
That makes retail a demanding kind of marketing, with the verdict arriving every week in the takings, and it’s also why so many retailers keep coming back to television.
Giving people a reason to make the trip
Most of what you sell can now be bought without leaving the house, so what your advertising really has to sell is the trip. People make it when they think it’ll be worth their while, either because there’s something on that won’t be there next week, or because the place is somewhere they like to be, and television is good at getting both across.
It tells a lot of people quickly, which matters when your sale starts on Friday and you need the whole area to know by Thursday night, and it lets them see your shop, your products and the atmosphere, which does far more than a line of text to make somebody feel like going. A lot of shopping trips are decided between two people on a sofa, and TV reaches them together. It can also be as local as your shops are, whether that’s the postcodes around one town or the whole region.
The event advert and the reputation advert
Most retailers end up needing two different kinds of advert, and it helps to keep them separate in your mind. The first is the event advert, for a sale, an opening, Christmas or a bank holiday, which has a date and an offer and runs hard for a short time. The second is the reputation advert, which is about why people should choose you at all, and since it isn’t tied to a date it can run for months or years. We’ve written more about the two in brand building or getting a response.
The difficulty with event adverts is that viewers have seen so many of them, and one retailer’s sale commercial looks much like the next. The Bed Experts had only ever run standard sale commercials on TV, so when we made a new one for them with the agency Gibson Media, we wanted it to really stand out in the ad break. It opens with an alarm going off, which grabs people’s attention at a moment when they might not be looking at the screen, and then comes the twist, when the customer wakes up and turns out to be in the bed showroom. The campaign was extremely successful, and it helped The Bed Experts to break their previous years’ sales records.
An offer also has to be easy to act on, which is why the advert we made with Gibson Media for OnSpec, a frame and lens specialist in the North East, covers their wide range of frames and their discounted prices and then tells viewers where the stores are across the region.
Reputation adverts usually have a more particular job than making people think well of you, and a common one is that customers know you for one thing and have no idea about the rest. George Bolam Foods is famous in the North East for its fresh, quality meat, but a lot of people didn’t realise there was also an in-house bakery, a restaurant and a large selection of fresh fruit, vegetables and fish. The advert we made with the agency Dickinson Media takes viewers through all that George Bolam has to offer, in a way that feels stylish and welcoming.
If the budget won’t stretch to two adverts, a sensible way of doing both jobs is one well-made advert with an ending that can be changed, so the same ad can carry this month’s offer and next month’s.
Shopping centres and outlets
Shopping centres and outlets are a slightly different job, because you’re selling a day out and not a single product. The advert has to make the place look like somewhere worth going, and that’s about atmosphere as much as offers.
Livingston Designer Outlet had been through a multi-million pound redevelopment, and beyond showing off the improvements, they wanted people to see the place as a high-end shopping experience. The advert needed to feel aspirational, but it also needed to feel attainable, because if you push that kind of thing too far people decide the place isn’t for them. So we highlighted the improvements in a subtle, classy way and let the look of the advert do the talking. It was one of our bigger shoots, with a lead model, a pianist and more than 30 extras, and the finished advert hugely surpassed the client’s expectations.
A centre’s Christmas campaign leans on feeling more than any other. For Metrocentre in Gateshead, the agency AL Marketing came up with the concept and brought us in to manage the production. It was shot in October 2021, when the Covid rules were beginning to ease and nobody had been able to have a big family Christmas the year before. The advert follows three generations of one family getting ready for Christmas at Metrocentre, and ends with the reunion they’d missed and the line “It turns out this year’s must-have is each other.”
Two things about that shoot apply to any centre. Because it was October, the Christmas decorations weren’t up in the malls yet, so we borrowed some of Metrocentre’s own and moved them from spot to spot as we went. Metrocentre’s marketing team were also with us all day, to keep things running smoothly and to make sure every brand that appears had approved its involvement, which any centre with well-known tenants has to plan for.
The rules on offers
Any offer in a TV advert is looked at before it goes on air by Clearcast, which checks adverts on the broadcasters’ behalf, and its questions come down to whether a customer who came in because of the advert would find what they’d been led to expect.
- “Was” and “now” prices have to be real. The higher price must have been charged, for a reasonable time.
- “Up to” savings need a fair proportion of items at the full discount. As a guide, the Advertising Standards Authority’s advice on savings claims, which is written for advertising outside TV and radio, says that anything under 10% of the products is unlikely to be enough.
- If stock is limited, or the offer is only in certain shops, the advert has to say so.
- End dates have to be honest. A sale that “must end Sunday” can’t quietly carry on.
These conditions usually appear as supers, the lines of small text at the bottom of the screen, and the simpler the offer, the less of the screen they take up. Credit offers and food bring rules of their own, and we’ve written separate guides to finance offers and to the HFSS rules on food and drink. We handle the clearance for you, and it goes more smoothly if the offer is settled before the script is written.
Planning around the retail calendar
Retail lives by the calendar, and unfortunately so does the price of airtime. The weeks before Christmas are the most expensive of the year because every retailer wants them, so it’s worth booking early and thinking about where you can get ahead of the rush. The January sales have the opposite advantage, because airtime is often good value once Christmas is over, and we’ve covered the reasons in why TV airtime costs more in some months.
The calendar also decides when the advert has to be made, because a Christmas commercial has to be filmed well before the decorations go up, as Metrocentre’s was. Once a campaign has run, it’s fairer to judge it against the same weeks last year than against the Saturday before, because footfall moves with the weather and the school holidays as well as with your advertising. We’ve written more about measuring what a campaign did.
Where to begin
Tell us what you sell, where your shops are and which weeks of the year matter most to you, and we’ll work up an idea and draw it as a storyboard, so you can decide from there whether it’s an advert you want to make. The storyboard is free, and you can ask for one here or get in touch for a conversation first. There’s a lot more to watch among our retail work.
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