CASBAA 2011: Linear advertising “won’t survive”

Entitled ‘Whose dollar is it anyway?’, hosted by Campaign Asia-Pacific, prominent marketers and agencies tackled a number of issues including the perceived loss of control over communications.

“As marketers we now realise, with the advent of digital, we had far less control than we thought we did,” said Unilever’s James Wong, adding that new tools of communication are a gift to marketers in how much of the consumer’s direct attention they can garner “compared to maybe 25 per cent of their attention we had before.”

But TBWA’s Keith Smith said there is a clear divide between those brands that know how to enter into dialogue with their audiences and those that don’t. “These are also potentially worrying times for brands who are getting those communications wrong, as we’ve seen recently with some airlines.”

Citing Apple and Uniqlo as examples of younger brands that are embracing direct communication with consumers, Smith said agencies should not feel under threat of being disintermediated from the brand conversation so long as they are eschewing the linear agency model of old. “There is still a huge role for agencies to play in coming up with the big brand idea, and being central to its execution,” he said.

Key to successful communication, said Philips’ Laura Ashton, is segmentation and clarity of objective. “If you have clearly determined who you want to reach, and how you intend to do it then you shouldn’t be afraid of losing control. What is the big event at the centre of the conversation? The linear process is no longer relevant,” she said.

Starcom’s Joanna von Felkerzam said the importance of SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) will become increasingly important to reaching consumers, with Ashton agreeing that smart devices will be core to real-time engagement with consumers on the path to purchase.

Unilever’s Wong stressed the importance of digital, but also said they recognize that marketing is an art rather than a science. “We’re putting the heart back into marketing,” he said, “but it’s not only about efficiency but effectiveness. We doubled our digital budget in 2010,  and did the same again this year, but we’re now looking at the quality of the impressions rather than the quantity.”