Here in Switzerland, newspaper advertising still dominates the marketing mix. It has one of the highest shares of advertising spend of any market in the world, and while most countries have seen classified ads begin their heavyweight migration to the web, here the changes are still yet to really get going. It’s an even greater paradox, because with broadband penetration and ad spend per capita among the highest in the world, online should be accounting for 8% or more of the advertising mix. Vested interests? Lack of innovation? New insights about the time the Swiss spend with their media paint a startling picture…
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Martin Radelfinger at AdLink Media is a veteran of the digital sector. With more than a decade in digital marketing he’s as comfortable lecturing communications theory to graduates in the local universities as he is in the boardroom (and having led the business through yet another accelerated phase of growth he’s very comfortable in the boardroom). When we’ve talked over the last few years his passions for figuring out the future of behavioural targeting have shone through at a time when most brands have not even started.
That’s why his latest insights into the Swiss market are set to be a wake-up call for loyal newspaper advertisers. By looking at the audiences in each media channel, and the amount of time they spend with the channel, he’s mapped out a specific disconnect in the most granular of detail.
From the start it’s clear that newspapers are the dominant media channel in Switzerland. Every country has a different patchwork of media that form the landscape and it’s important to recognise from the start that there are no ‘rights or wrongs’ in how media is consumed. There may be common trends over time towards the increase in digital consumption and the decrease in newspaper circulation, but these need to be accepted as the landscape.
However, what Radelfinger is exploring is deeper than this. He’s looking into the share of voice advertisers have in a channel, and whether their communication is standing out, or getting crowded out. That high volume of spend concentrated within a single channel would be a cause for concern, but when it’s combined with a low portion of time per person the alarm bells should ring.
Here in Switzerland, there’s not just a mismatch between where the advertisers are placing their budgets and where audiences place their attention, there’s a chasm.
The Radelfinger formula exposes that newspapers are more than 100 times over-invested in than the web, and that magazines are a staggering 1000 times over-invested in compared to online. Conclusion? Budgets are wasted.
It’s indisputable. If the numbers were close then you could argue the methodologies or debate the wonders of sample bias and the different ways we process media signals. But when differences are several orders of magnitude, you don’t need a degree in statistics to see the significance. They convey the sad truth: budgets are being wasted.
One media channel is over saturated and simply can’t deliver the incremental marketing impact that would come from moving that last portion of the budget elsewhere. Since 2001 there has been a strong stream of research about how media planners can optimise the media mix, but it demands the ability to see across the whole media schedule rather than just the web.
The irony is that brands can get much better marketing results for the same budgets, by just increasing the reach or the frequency of a campaign in the channels that are under exploited. In Switzerland this would probably benefit television as well as the web, but clearly there have been forces of inertia that have provided strong resistance.
