Riding the Storm
Study: Cross platform advertising multiplies sales; same will hold true for widgets we believe
Advertising campaigns that use a number of different media platforms increase not only their reach but also the likelihood that consumers will actually buy the product or service, according to a new study from Integrated Media Measurement. “Until now, the value of a multiplatform advertising campaign was thought to be just an increase in reach,” said Amanda Welsh, head of research for Integrated Media. “But the impact of advertising on multiple platforms on conversion and getting consumers to engage in the target behavior is potentially more important. You can read about the study here or get the complete report from the IMM site.
What We Think
This makes sense ... because advertising on multiple platforms serves to increase not just reach but also frequency. Also, to the extent you use multiple channels of communication, consumers may start to experience your brand differently, by hearing your brand on radio, for example, or experiencing your brand in a more visceral hands-on way when they engage with a widget or social application. What we find interesting about this research is that it has clear applications for the widget space. For some time now, we’ve been working with agencies and brand marketers who are forward thinking enough to recognize to move beyond the “GMOT” phase - when some one in management has barked “get me one of those” and in response the agency or marketing manager hopped to and built a widget as a knee jerk response. Instead, companies that work with us may start out by building a widget or social application for a single platform - say Facebook, the web, or MySpace, but end up taking what they’ve built and morphing it just a few clicks to support multiple platforms. The benefits of doing this are enormous. Yes, they expand their reach, but also they increase their frequency for virtually no additional cost, something that is increasingly important in a media world that is fragmented and cluttered and where younger and more influential targets tend to consume multiple kinds of media at a time. The old rule of thumb in media was that it took a frequency of 3 to break through the clutter and get heard. The new rule? Who knows. A frequency of 6-7x is generally recommended but may not be sufficient. Which makes the new imperative not “GMOT” but “BIO DIE” - build it once and deploy it everywhere, from Facebook, to OpenSocial, to the web, to mobile phones such as the iPhone.
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