The 28th Edition of The CMO Survey found marketing budgets for traditional advertising increasing for the first time in a decade, although well below the expected growth rates for digital marketing in the coming year.
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, researchers led by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business said traditional advertising’s newfound appeal is partly due to challenges associated with digital marketing, such as the annoyance of pop-up videos and other conventional online advertising approaches as well as the imminent demise of third-party cookie tracking and increasing doubts about digital marketing’s effectiveness.
Traditional advertising, at the same time, has long been trusted more by consumers, sees greater relative engagement as costs have fallen and stands to benefit from merging digital technologies such as URLs and QR codes, according to the researchers.
Finally, traditional marketing, in some cases, is said to still translate messages better than digital. The authors wrote, “For example, broadcast TV continues to offer an ideal platform for emotional storytelling ads, such as the clever ‘Welcome Back’ Guinness ad that marked the reopening of pubs and restaurants following the Covid-19 lockdown.”
A number of articles trace a potential revival of traditional advertising to credibility losses by online influencers. A recent consumer survey conducted by Wakefield Research for The Desire Company found only 11 percent of Americans believe influencers deliver trustworthy reviews.
The annual Gartner “2022 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey” found online advertising still expected to take the largest share (56 percent) of marketers’ dollars in 2022, with spending led by social advertising, closely followed by paid search and digital display. Offline channels are expected to see more spending than in recent years with Gartner identifying a shift from digital-first to hybrid multichannel strategies.
“There has been a lot of discussion around COVID-19 shifting consumers to a digital-first mindset. However, as Western Europe and North America relax pandemic protocols, customer journeys have recalibrated,” said Ewan McIntyre, chief of research and vice president analyst in the Gartner for Marketing Leaders practice, in a statement. “Post-lockdown, CMOs need to listen carefully to their customers and pay attention to the channels they are using, as this more closely resembles a hybrid reality.”
Source: retailwire.com
