Why TV advertising?
For a long time, TV was seen as something only the big national brands could afford to do. That isn’t really the case any more, because these days you can combine the scale, impact and credibility of television with buying that’s far more targeted than it used to be.
TV makes brands feel bigger
There’s something about seeing a business on the telly. Rightly or wrongly, people assume that if you’re on TV you must be established, you must be doing well, and you’ll probably still be around next year, and that gives an advert on TV a kind of weight that a sponsored post on social media never quite has.
What that means for you is that the conversation with a new customer starts in a different place, because by the time they get in touch they’ve already heard of you and they’re already taking you seriously.
Get noticed
We’re all bombarded with advertising from the moment we pick up our phones in the morning, and most of it we scroll past, skip or block without even noticing who it was for.
A good TV ad is a different thing altogether. It fills the screen, it’s got sound, and it’s got thirty seconds to tell a little story, and when that’s done well it builds the kind of recognition and familiarity that means people feel like they already know you by the time they need what you’re selling.
Build trust
Television is still one of the most established places you can advertise. Every advert has to be approved before it goes anywhere near the air, and yours will be appearing alongside programmes and brands that people have known for years.
Being seen in that sort of company reflects well on your business, and it’s part of the reason TV advertisers get taken seriously.
TV can drive action
TV often gets filed under “brand awareness”, as if that’s all it’s good for, but in practice most campaigns are built around something much more specific, whether that’s sales, website visits, enquiries, applications, store visits, recruitment or ticket sales.
To give you a few examples from our own work, Bradford College’s campaign generated a 474.5% increase in views of its clearing webpage compared with 2017/2018 and went on to exceed its recruitment targets, The Bed Experts’ campaign helped them to break their previous sales records, and Enhance Conservatories told us that in a short time they’d become recognised as a major player in the North East home improvement marketplace.
You don’t have to advertise to everyone
One of the biggest misconceptions about TV is that you have to buy the whole country. You never really had to, because ITV has always sold its airtime by region, so if your business is in the North East you can advertise to the North East and nowhere else.
That’s what has always made TV realistic for regional businesses, because you’re only paying to reach people who could actually become customers, and not somebody three hundred miles away who’s never going to walk through your door. What’s changed in recent years is how much more precise you can be than a region, and that’s where the next few options come in.
AdSmart from Sky
AdSmart from Sky takes that targeting a step further, and you’ll sometimes hear it called addressable TV. Instead of everybody who’s watching a programme seeing the same ad break, different households can be shown different adverts, even though they’re all watching the same thing.
You get to choose who sees yours. Location can go right down to postcode level, and you can also pick households by things like age, whether there are children at home, income band, the type of property and whether they own a car. So a local business can stick to the areas it serves, and a more specialist business can focus on the kind of households that are most likely to buy, and either way your advert is appearing on well-known channels but only in the homes you’ve picked.
Streaming, Netflix and YouTube
A lot of telly is now watched through the broadcasters’ own streaming services, such as ITVX and Channel 4’s. It’s the same programmes from the same broadcasters, and most of it is still watched on the big screen in the living room. It just arrives over the internet instead of through an aerial. Those services carry adverts too, and because viewers are signed in, the adverts can be aimed at particular audiences, based on things like age group, interests, the kind of programmes being watched and, in many cases, where people live.
You might hear people call this BVOD, which stands for broadcaster video on demand, and what it means in practice is that your advert can follow your audience around, whether they’re watching something live or catching up on it later in the week. It works alongside traditional TV and doesn’t replace it, and plenty of campaigns use both.
It doesn’t stop with the broadcasters. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video both carry adverts now, and a huge amount of YouTube is watched on television sets and not on phones. Your TV advert can run on all three, on the same screen in the same living room, and our media buying partners can plan it in alongside everything else.
TV and digital, not TV or digital
People sometimes talk about this as if you have to pick a side, and you really don’t. A strong TV campaign gives you footage and a level of brand recognition that help all of your other marketing to work harder.
Once somebody’s seen you on TV, your name is already familiar when it pops up in a Google search, on YouTube or in their social feed. On top of that, the footage from your advert can be re-cut for YouTube, paid and organic social and remarketing, and the same idea can carry through to radio and outdoor, so that the whole campaign looks and sounds like it belongs together.
The creative still matters
Buying good media can’t rescue an advert that nobody notices or remembers. Equally, there’s not much point making an amazing advert if the right people never get to see it. It’s why we suggest the 80:20 rule as a starting point for splitting your budget between the two.
The two things have to work together, and that’s why we always start with what you’re trying to achieve and then work backwards from there to the idea and the media.
Next question
So what does it cost?
There are two budgets to think about, and both of them can be scaled to suit what you’re trying to do.