Video killed the online star

Posted by Luke Mantell, on 01st August 2018

In a world where marketing and media buyers are embracing the ‘AI revolution’ to optimise their online targeting and improve ROI it can often feel like ‘traditional’ media is dead. A recent study by RadioCentre and Ebiquity suggests this couldn’t be further from the truth. TV still rules the roost. Social media, online video and online display are consistently overrated by practitioners. Their study combines proprietary metrics, reviews of published reports and interviews from a number of agency professionals (as a quantie I’ll put the warning here that some bases are a bit low for my liking). They compare the actual performance (from proprietary metrics) of 10 different media against the perception of how well each medium performances for 12 different attributes. For 9 out of the 12 attributes online is overrated! A quick summary of the results are below

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Clearly the evidence suggests there’s still a place for traditional media in the media mix and while online does have its place, it shouldn’t always be the go-to for all campaigns. The online world changes rapidly with new innovations, trends and challenges (nearly wrote an article without hinting at GDPR). I know that personally I’ve seen a sharp rise in articles proclaiming that an agency has started using AI and promising algorithms that improve ROI by 100%. However, we still need to be wary of our own innovation biases, we need to take a step back and interrogate the evidence behind the claims before deciding on a media strategy.