What Media Drives Long-Term Sales Best?

Despite rumors of its demise, TV is the king of long-term sales.

Thinkbox did an impressively-large study on how media drive sales: 50 brands in 6 categories (FMCG, finance, retail, online retail, automotive and travel), covering 11 media types, over 3 years. That’s about £1.4Bn in ad spend. Whoa.

Then they did a bunch of econometrics to figure out how much of a sales contribution each medium delivered, and over what time frames.

One thing they found was that TV delivered almost TWICE as much sales in the long-term as it did in the first 2 weeks. Cinema, VOD, OOH and online video also were somewhat better in the long-term than the short.

Sadly, long-term effects are seldom measured. And it’s even harder to do attribution modeling. It’s much easier to see a next-day bump from a previous-day radio spot or banner ad. But it’s oh-so-human to only look where the light is brightestand the metrics are easiest.

On the other end, Online display delivered like 99% of its sales in the first 2 weeks. Yowza! Radio, search, social media, and print were similarly biased towards short-term results, but not as much.

WHY? They don’t say. I’d guess it’s a combo of several things, most importantlly the creative. TV is more prone to run brand-focused, image-building, mental-availability, memory-building type work, whereas online display is more likely to be about “buy now!” and ”click here!” Crass stereotypes, but a fair hypothesis.

(They also found that TV was the biggest contributor to sales, but I suspect this is due to the budget allocations.)

But with all this talk of ”the long and the short” and “two-speed marketing”, it’s interesting to see what kinds of media deliver what.

Caveats, of course. And Mandy Rice-Davies applies (Thinkbox is the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK).

But read the whole thing & see what you see: https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/thinkbox-research/demand-generation/