NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Please replace the release with the following corrected version due to multiple revisions.
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EHRENBERG-BASS INSTITUTE’S PROFESSOR BYRON SHARP REVEALS WHY TOP ADVERTISERS ARE RETURNING TO TELEVISION IN INTERVIEW WITH ANA CEO BOB LIODICE AT TVB FORWARD 2017
Overwhelming Empirical Evidence From Largest Global Marketing Research Center Shows Brands Lose When Budgets Shift Away From Legacy Media’s Proven Reach
Last Thursday, at TVB Forward 2017 – Local Broadcast Television’s Annual Outlook Conference in New York City, a record audience of over 550 television CEOs and media executives heard ANA CEO Bob Liodice interview one of the world’s most influential voices in marketing, Professor Byron Sharp, Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Based at the University of South Australia Business School, the Institute’s research is supported by many of the world’s leading corporations including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, P&G, Turner Broadcasting, Mars Inc. and many others. The event coincided with the release of “Are Big Brands Dying?” a new report co-authored by Professor Sharp that challenges many of the unproven conventional ideas held by marketers today. The full interview can be viewed on TVB’s website: http://www.tvb.org/Public/ForwardConference2017Highlights/LiodiceSharpInterview.aspx.
“The ANA and TVB share a commitment in helping our respective members thrive in the new marketing frontier,” said Bob Liodice, ANA CEO. “TVB Forward Conference has become the premiere forum for the advancement of local media and the ANA was extremely pleased to have Professor Byron Sharp share his insights with an audience of leading advertising and television broadcast executives. One of the key takeaways during my interview with Professor Sharp is that marketers have become distracted. While there has been significant growth in new media ad spend, we have also seen a meaningful decrease in total domestic business sales for two consecutive years. To help brands grow and prosper it is important for marketers to have access to better, more transparent metrics and to conduct careful experiments with their advertising budgets to ensure they have the right mix of both legacy media and new media.”
At the conference, Professor Sharp discussed some of the main themes from his book, “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. Professor Sharp’s research reveals that brands largely compete in terms of consumers’ mental and physical availability. Most consumers typically buy a brand’s products once a year or less, therefore marketers need continuous broad reach advertising – such as broadcast television – that is relatively inexpensive so their brands come to mind at the right time and place to influence product purchases.
Key takeaways from Bob Liodice’s interview with Professor Sharp at Forward 2017 include:
- To grow, brands need more loyal customers, not more loyalty from their existing customers
- Millennials are just like anyone else, they are naturally brand loyal
- Legacy media has reliable, trustworthy metrics
- Reach is not optional, brands need to reach all category buyers
- Massive amounts of money is wasted on overly targeted new digital media with unproven ability to reach consumers
- There is no empirical evidence that more targeting is better
- Great brands across the world were built on continuous advertising
“The TVB and ANA are focused on evaluating new tools and opportunities that will help our members and stakeholders grow their respective businesses, and we are grateful for the ANA’s partnership and continued participation in our annual Forward Conference,” said Steve Lanzano, TVB President and CEO. “Professor Sharp’s research reveals that new media’s low viewability, fraud and other ad quality issues may have led to significant waste in marketing spend. With more options for advertisers to deliver their messages than ever before, television’s unmatched reach and credibility still offers advertisers the best ROI-driven marketing solutions. Our strong local platforms are proven and our metrics are trusted, reliable and accountable. Importantly, TVB looks forward to continuing our work with our membership to develop standards-based open APIs to create a more efficient marketplace so our industry can deliver even more cost-effective, high quality marketing options for advertisers and brands.”
Featured comments from Professor Bryon Sharp during his interview at Forward 2017 include:
- “There are some huge advantages as far as the legacy media. We’ve always been fans of TV because it’s fast and vast. The evidence on how buyers buy and how brands grow suggests that particularly for some marketers it is extraordinarily valuable.”
- “We never did our homework as marketers, we didn’t even know about our old media. We didn’t know how to use that effectively and then we rushed off into this Wild West new stuff that we knew even less than nothing about and, needless to say, wasted astonishing amounts of money when we should have been doing careful experiments and working out what was best.”
- “To target everyone, reach is not optional. You must have reach. But you need to reach people’s brains with something that will actually go in, so this is why we need high quality creativity and high quality exposures and we need them in a way that’s cheap. You can see why we’ve always been fans of broadcast video, it hits a lot of those things.”
- “About 10 years ago, we put out research saying radical things like ‘TV was not going to die.’ I think people thought we were a bit crazy at the time. But we pointed out the fundamental patterns of viewing and that they have survived astonishing social and technological change and we didn’t really see that changing. We said the arrival of various new media was exciting because any new media is exciting, but you need to take your money and do experiments and learn about it.”
- “Those myths that there is no wastage on digital, hyper-targeting… You know my twitter feed this morning was showing me adds for spray to use in vineyards… well, I like wine but I don’t own a vineyard. This is the hyper-targeting? Amazing. And no wastage? Oh, except the wastage when the ad doesn’t actually get on screen or when it doesn’t actually reach a human… I mean no, this new media has all sorts of issues just like we had with the old media and we needed to learn about that. People didn’t.”
- “Legacy media has always had some really great things about them and also their metrics were reliable because they are older, settled down. They’ve got careful metrics that we can trust.”
- “You need to be constantly reminding people that you exist. Fortunately, you don’t have to say something terribly profound, you just have to say basic but in an interesting way so that they pay attention. This is why you see some of the great brands across the world were built on continuous advertising. Advertising campaigns that ran for long periods that were constantly in the market place and that were really creative so people liked them.”
- “The idea that more targeting is better has never been logically true and empirically it’s a great way to just burn money. Our research shows that brands largely compete as brands so they sell to everyone. So Nike’s customer base looks very similar to Adidas, Fila and Puma— even the same people often.”
- “Your biggest challenge is to reach the people who will be buying a car in the future and make sure that when they do come into the market you are one of the two or three brands that they look at, because they only look at 2-3 brands. A huge portion of brand sales this year are from people who didn’t even buy last year. So we need reach, reach is not optional.”
About TVB
TVB is the not-for-profit trade association of America’s local broadcast television industry. Its members include television broadcast groups, advertising sales reps, syndicators, international broadcasters, associate members and over 800 individual television stations. TVB actively promotes local media marketing solutions to the advertising community, and in so doing works to develop advertising dollars for the medium’s multiple platforms, including on-air, online and mobile. TVB provides a diverse variety of tools and resources, including www.tvb.org, to support its members and to help advertisers make the best use of local ad dollars.
