The popularity of social media marketing and online ads is on the rise, thanks to the change in consumer behaviours.
As people spend less time with TV and radio programmes, businesses and advertisers must adapt accordingly. As is evinced by smothering banner ads and viral videos, digital and social-media marketing are on the rise. In a day and age when almost every consumer has a smartphone in their hands, perpetually connected to the Internet’s wealth of content, online advertising is no longer a gimmick or an alternative. It’s the future.
“I think it’s only a matter of time before digital becomes the dominant medium for advertising in any form,” said Marcus Tesoreiro, creative director of the Sydney-based agency Affinity. Tesoreiro was also among the jury members for the Interactive category at Adfest 2016’s Lotus Awards, held earlier this year in Pattaya.
“Most consumers who still rely on traditional, scheduled television programmes as their main form of media tend to be low-income consumers in rural areas, but even they will slowly convert, as smartphones and tablets continue to become cheaper.”
Whether you like it or not, it’s almost impossible to avoid ads online nowadays. From sponsored posts in Facebook or Instagram to commercial clips that play before you watch a video on YouTube, smartphones and their myriad apps have given advertisers and marketers the ability to reach you anytime, anywhere. Moreover, most service providers — Facebook being the most prominent — also track your activity on these apps, allowing advertisers to further tailor their content to you specifically, based on — for example — your biographical data and the pages you’ve liked.
While the thought of Facebook knowing about your obsession with pugs and kittens can sound disheartening, Tesoreiro assures us that it’s not all bad, as this means you will rarely have to sit through an ad that you feel has nothing to do with you.
“Digital data allows advertisers to craft very specific messages for very specific people,” he said.
“You can find targets as specific as, say, mid-level cooks aged 35 who work within a certain radius, for example, and place your marketing in places you know they frequent. Not only does this ensure that your message will reach the people you want it to, it’s also much cheaper than producing and airing a commercial all year long in the hope that they’ll see it.”
Tesoreiro recalls a campaign his agency worked on for Australian swimming-pool company Narellan Pools, which used extensive data from various sources to determine the optimum time for the company to run its TV ads in different regions, avoiding the purchase of unnecessary airtime. The results were spectacular; not only did the client see a 20% increase in sales, the agency was also able to return 30% of Narellan Pools’ marketing budget, something almost unheard of when it comes to TV advertising. “We blew their goals out of the water — excuse the pun — and still managed to return some of their money,” said the creative director.
“So in some ways, you could say that the rise of digital media has made advertising much more precise and efficient for clients. Hopefully, more clients will see how this can save them money, so they’ll be more willing to allocate larger amounts of their budget into digital, and we can continue to achieve higher qualities of production.”
Despite the proven effectiveness of online and digital campaigns, many companies around the world still rely heavily on traditional means of advertising, mainly television commercials. Due to the high cost of production and airtime fees, this leaves precious few resources available for the production of online campaigns.
“Today, digital marketing and advertising in Thailand generally take up about eight to 10 percent of a given business’s yearly marketing budget,” said Jinn Pao-Prapai, founder and managing director of CJ Worx, widely recognised in the industry as one of Thailand’s best digital agencies. Despite being relatively young, CJ Worx is behind some of Thailand’s most successful online marketing campaigns in recent memory, such as the 2012 Magnum Fin-nomenon campaign and, more recently, “My Beautiful Woman” campaign of Wacoal, whose short films have been shared over 10 million times around the world and been covered by international news agencies.
“That said, the amount of investment in digital marketing has been growing quite meteorically every year. While the exact figures may seem negligible compared to the budget for traditional marketing, it also means we have a lot of room to grow.”
According to Jinn, one of the most important things a marketer must keep in mind when creating a campaign for digital space is honesty. Unlike the one-way nature of TV ads, online and social-media advertisements are vulnerable to the negative comments of unhappy consumers. While the right campaign can do wonders for your business, the wrong one can destroy you just as fast.
“Before the days of online marketing, you largely didn’t need to care what the consumers thought about your ad,” he said. “Even if they didn’t like it, the most they’d do is tell their friends and family as much and forget about it the next day. But online, where there are comment boxes, consumers will not hesitate to call you out on any offence or falsity they perceive in your ad. If they don’t think the food at your restaurant is as good as you claim, they won’t think twice about letting everyone know. In other words, you can’t focus solely on the brand message; you need to think about the conversation that comes after, as well.”
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.