Today, consumers often check their mobile phones before they roll out of bed—and then check them an average of 150 more times throughout the day. At work, many consumers spend the majority of their days staring at a computer screen. When they’re not at work, many view entertainment on demand across multiple screens ranging from a mobile device to a TV.

Long gone are the days when the family gathered around the TV, captivated by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in I Love Lucy, which garnered a 71.7 rating at its peak in 1953.¹ In 2018, the top scripted show, This Is Us, only achieved a 9.3 rating during its most-watched episode.² Back in the 1950s, there were few options for both consumers and advertisers, so fewer ads would provide mass reach with high consumer attention. Even as recently as the late 1990s, TV shows such as Seinfeld and Friends drew large audiences. But TV no longer dominates consumer attention. Viewers are in control of when, where, and how they consume content, and are no longer reliant on TV schedules set by networks or on sharing a single TV with everyone in the home.

In today’s world, marketers must not only define how digital has changed consumer behavior and what it means for their branding efforts, but also choose digital partners to support consumer communications. Digital technology has spawned myriad companies whose mission is to help marketers build brands and navigate this new digital world. The advertising and ad technology landscape has become incredibly complex and fragmented, as is depicted in various LUMAscapes (see https://lumapartners.com/luma-content).

There are giant tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, as well as smaller players, such as Pinterest and Snapchat. Sprouting up across this new ecosystem are thousands of new companies with business models fully dependent on extracting value in the digital supply chain.

The sheer number of technology options and service providers can be overwhelming. How do marketers keep up? One thing is very clear: marketers must embrace the notion of modern brand building in a digital world rather than viewing digital as simply another communications channel.

As an industry leader at Google, I’ve seen and helped hundreds of brands transition their marketing efforts with varying degrees of success. Traditional media and digital media require different skills and activities, and organizations with the right talent structure and mindset for change enjoy a smoother ride on this journey.

Traditional media campaigns—especially TV campaigns—often require companies to commit to a creative and media strategy far in advance of when consumers actually see the campaign. Then data on campaign effectiveness can take months to obtain and analyze. By contrast, digital campaigns provide some immediate metrics about their effectiveness in driving consumer action, such as clicks or even sales, which fosters an approach that allows for continual improvement and optimization. The nature of more active campaign management requires focused efforts and agility, and an appetite for taking risks, trying new approaches, and learning continually.

There isn’t one perfect organizational structure to accommodate all business models or transformation stages. At the early stages of embracing digital, a devoted digital team may be appropriate for determining how digital media fits into the larger company strategy. Changing an organizational structure can be difficult, but it can vastly impact your ability to reap the rewards of the new digital environment.

In this chapter I provide three recommendations for senior leaders seeking to align their marketing, branding, and communication strategies to reach consumers in a digital world.

Recommendation 1: Choose Fewer Digital Media Partners and Develop Deep Relationships with Them

Digital marketing is incredibly fragmented and prolific. There are dozens of platforms to use and partners to work with. Choosing the right partners can help marketers stay focused on the most impactful business outcomes and keep their companies at the forefront of innovation. Fewer partnerships can also save time for marketers and agencies.

When transforming digital marketing capabilities, it’s important to make the transition from a transactional media partnership to a true business partnership. Start by developing a joint business plan and/or partnership strategy, and engage your partners in helping to solve your business problems. You should ask for thought leadership on data strategy, industry expertise, organizational talent and structure, and processes that will help to achieve your goals. As part of the dialogue, establish common goals and agree on performance indicators.

The key here is to think of your digital partners as more than just media. Your partners have a wealth of data about your consumers that will allow you to leverage insights to shape your total business strategy and activation, not just digital communications.

For example, Google search data enabled a bourbon brand to uncover a strong positive correlation between search query volume and brand bottle sales.³ The data also offered the company insight about consumers’ interests and concerns related to the category. The top three questions consumers asked Google related to bourbon are “What is bourbon?,” “How do I drink bourbon?,” and “What is the difference between whiskey and bourbon?” Google analytics also revealed that most queries about bourbon take place between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m.⁴ For this spirits advertiser, insights from Google’s data helped illuminate opportunities for brand communications to be relevant and useful to their consumers, with the right message at the right time. Insights such as this resulted in new advertising creative strategies that generated breakout ad recall and brand-awareness lifts on YouTube, far surpassing industry benchmarks.

The takeaway is that if your digital partners are only bringing you media plans, you should ask whether they are the right partners, and/or whether you can leverage them more effectively.

Recommendation 2: Creative Content Must Work In a Mobile Environment

Consumers today often view ads on very tiny screens, and all ads can be skipped no matter how they are delivered. Distracted viewing behavior has only grown over time, and innovations in digital ad formats have heightened the need for advertisers to earn viewer retention. Although YouTube is viewed on all screen types, more than half of YouTube viewing is on a mobile device, and for some brands up to 85 percent of viewing occurs on mobile devices.

Both TV and online video ads are built with sight, sound, and motion, but the viewing environment differs significantly. As an analogy, think about an ad placed on a billboard on the side of highway, a print ad in a magazine, and a bus wrap. These are all still images, but the context and consumer engagement with each medium differs greatly. Would you put the same version of an ad in these three locations? Probably not—you would tailor it to the medium.

Similarly, to improve creative effectiveness in the digital environment, advertisers should build creative strategy with a mobile screen in mind. Creative content and execution is half to two-thirds of advertising effectiveness, according to Dynamic Logic⁵ and Nielsen.⁶ The old three-step story arc of a commercial spot—establishing the accepted consumer belief, delivering brand benefit, and giving a reason to believe—has changed. Today, grabbing attention in the first five seconds of an ad by starting with the peak of the story arc is the preferred method to engage consumers. Use the initial interaction to establish your brand and earn the next 10, 20, or 30+ seconds of viewer attention.

What can help create better video ads for mobile? Consider that the screen size of a TV is at least 10 times larger than that of mobile. Mobile is an intimate, one-to-one experience on a small, handheld screen. These tips can help your creative be more effective:

• Talent speaking directly to the consumer creates a more personal connection.
• Tight framing focuses the viewer’s attention by more clearly conveying facial expressions and emotions to better highlight the brand benefit.
• Quick pacing and multiple story arc peaks keep consumers engaged and away from the “skip” button.
• High contrast and/or bright lighting improve the viewing experience on mobile, whose users may dim lighting to preserve battery life.
• Clear calls to action or next steps take advantage of the interactive nature of mobile.

It’s critical to review rough cuts and final spots on a mobile device before viewing them on a larger screen. Are the sponsoring brand and the main message clear? Can you see the talent’s facial expression? Can you read the text? If the message isn’t conveyed on a mobile screen, hit the edit button.

Recommendation 3: Tie Your Metrics for Success to the Medium and to Your Business Goals

Using the right metrics to understand the performance of a campaign allows the advertiser to adjust the media mix and optimize advertising spending.

The ultimate goal of any marketing or advertising campaign is to increase sales efficiently. Thus, in an ideal world, the effectiveness of a campaign (with either traditional or digital media) would be judged by its impact on sales. However, disentangling the effect of a campaign from numerous other factors that also affect sales can be challenging, and it is also difficult to calculate the impact on long-term metrics, such as brand equity. Further, just knowing the impact on brand sales in the near term offers limited insight into why the campaign succeeded or failed. Therefore, metrics tied to the media presentation (who saw the ad, how many times people saw the ad, whether they clicked on the ad and/or visited the brand’s web site) and intermediate marketing goals (new customer acquisition, customer retention, revenue per user) are both valuable. No one metric is sufficient; insight comes from laddering media outcomes to marketing to business (sales) outcomes.

Below are three things to keep in mind when evaluating communications in digital versus traditional media.

Summary

The digital world enables you to build stronger brands by being present with the right message at each stage in the customer’s path to purchase. Doing so requires you to identify the right partners and forge deep, meaningful relationships with them. In addition, creative content must be built for an online, mobile, and connected world in order to maximize effectiveness. It is also important to have clear business, marketing, and media objectives, and to measure outcomes that allow for real-time assessment of where a communication plan may be falling short. The pace of change in our digital world has accelerated, so building strong brands means marketers have to be as agile and adaptive as the platforms in the market.

Cindy Halvorsen is the head of industry, home, and fashion brands at Google. She previously worked in brand management and consumer insights positions at Kraft Heinz, Wm. Wrigley Jr., and Procter & Gamble. She received her MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 2010.

Notes