Netting a billboard in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square used to be the pinnacle of advertorial achievement. With millions of eyes passing your site every day, you had a captive audience with a capacity for engagement limited only by the creativity of your marketing team.
The State of Play
Now, times have changed, and as new channels and technologies compete for consumer attention, it can be difficult to know where your budget could be most effectively invested. Overwhelmed by choice and struck by decision inertia, many marketers are still opting to leave their budget where it has always been, leading to a misguided bias for traditional channels such as Out-of-Home (OOH), TV or print.
Historically regarded as the strongest players when it came to building brand awareness on an incomparable scale, these three channels have capitalised on traditional models for human existence — after all, everyone goes outside and almost everyone owns a television. However, just as magazines and newspapers have steadily fallen out of favour with consumers, so too have these once-popular marketing channels. Further to this, as digital mediums such as social media and influencer marketing have entered the arena, offering the same reach as traditional channels but with the measurability their predecessors lacked, traditional channels have been rendered almost redundant.
Consumer Behaviour
The simple fact is that the way we interact with and exist within the world has changed dramatically since the heyday of traditional marketing; TVs have become little more than background noise, and billboards go unnoticed as consumer attention – even on the move – remains glued to the screens in their hands. In fact, a report commissioned by Facebook recently found that 94% of people keep their smartphone to hand when they’re watching TV, and in-home eye-tracking showed that viewers are only even focused on the television 53% of the time. Now who wants to place bets as to what that number drops to when the ad break comes on?
The abundance of media and entertainment has led to shortened attention spans and greater competition for them, nec