Media Effectiveness: Marketers Mislead Advertisers

A new report conducted by Ebiquity, a United Kingdom based leading independent marketing and media has shown that marketers’ perceptions about which channels perform best in terms of media effectiveness may be misleading and divorced from reality.

According to Mark Ritson, a professor of Marketing and award winning columnist, the report conducted by Ebiquity is independent and uses empirical evidence. “I have no doubt this will be a signature source of data – quoted and debated for many months to come”, he said.

Radiocare hired communications consulting firm to review the state of marketing media in 2018. The media examined in the study are the 10 major channels that account for the vast majority of advertising in this country: direct mail, magazines, newspapers, online display, online video, out-of-home, radio, social media and TV.

Ebiquity’s challenge in conducting the research was to compare the perceptions of advertisers and agencies on various advertising media with the reality of what each of these media channels actually offers, according to third-party assessment.

For the perceptions part, the researcher interviewed 68 marketers working in companies that spent £2m or more on advertising last year. There are not that many companies spending that much on advertising so this is a big sample. it also interviewed executives from 48 different advertising agencies (covering the gamut of media and creative shops).

To assess the actual performance of each channel, the Ebiquity team used secondary data from a wide variety of places. Fifty different sources and more than 75 published reports – all conducted since 2010 – were used to build a picture of how each channel performs against the others.

this data was combined with ebiquity’s proprietary benchmarks from working with a multitude of global clients and linked this information to third-party evidence such as the IPA’s influential touchpoints data. It’s a huge effort and one that provides an up-to-date and highly detailed view of the current British media environment.

The result showed that marketers’ perception of media effectiveness is a far cry from the reality. While the evidence show that Radio, Social Media, TV, Online display are best, in descending order, at targeting people in the right place at the right time, advertisers and agencies say Direct Mail, Social Media, TV, Online Video and Online Display are the best five, in descending order.

It is believed that the report will impact media planning and redress the negative perception of the traditional media by media planners.