Source: Marketing Magazin
At a media forum of the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA), Mark Ritson, a British professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School and a longtime columnist for the British magazine Marketing Week, shared his opinion on the rejection of traditional media advertising. Marketers are so eager to be in-touch with the advertising trends that they often use only social networks for their advertising campaigns.
According to Ritson, social networks Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are extremely over-rated among marketers who are rejecting traditional media for the sake of social networks. Among other things, in his lecture he cited studies that show that 63 percent of people believe the advertising content on television, and 60 percent of them believe ads in print media. In contrast, only 46 percent of people believe ads on social networks. He believes that marketers, who earmark their entire advertising budgets for social networks, are poorly informed and trained in marketing.
“It’s symptomatic of the culture we have created that marketers themselves are reticent to investigate social media in any more detail than saying ‘digital is the future’,” Ritson said. He did not blame the slew of new digital and social media agencies, saying they are “doing a really good job” of pushing their message to marketers, but marketing executives who had abandoned their “critical faculties”.
“The hegemonic forces of marketing are such that it’s now career threatening to suggest that I might prefer to spend my money on TV or, God forbid, print [over social media] – you are not allowed to say that and I find that very distasteful. Almost half the coverage on Australian media is on social and digital tools, and yet it will probably be between 8 to 10 per cent of our spend this year,” Ritson highlighted.
According to Ritson, 85 percent of all video content is still seen on television. Also in the last five years radio experienced greater reach. When these data are presented to marketers, only the results of the reach of social media are highlighted. Ritson himself has a great affection for the television and print media. Regardless of the fact that he does not agree with the marketers who want to allocate their funds only to digital advertising, Ritson believes that this is perhaps understandable given the strong trend of digital advertising.
Here’s the complete lecture by Mark Ritson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCAEbirIByc
