What else could you buy in place of (1) Super Bowl ad?

This year, companies invested approximately $4.5 million per 30-second spot to advertise to the record 114+ millions of consumers watching the Super Bowl. Although the Super Bowl serves as the most anticipated advertising event of the year, Marketing Keys wanted to highlight alternative ad packages for the $4.5 million budget instead of one Super Bowl ad:

1. Prime Time TV

Advertisers could purchase about (12) 30-second prime time TV ads for the $4.5 million it cost for one Super Bowl ad. The flip side? There is always the risk that consumers will fast forward through the ad on DVR, whereas Super Bowl ads are watched live.

2. Online Video

An advertiser could display a video ad online about 500 million times over an 18 day period, resulting in about 145 million consumers viewing the ad a few times each, whereas a Super Bowl ad reached millions of consumers at once.

3. Year-long Magazine Campaign

$4.5 million could buy about 96 full-page color print ads to run in every issue of high profile magazines, such as Rolling Stone and GQ.

4. Online Banner Ads

Advertisers could purchase around 1.3 billion banner ad impressions on websites featuring arts, entertainment and news content, and around 8 million ad impressions on websites featuring sports. The only risk is that your ad could go unnoticed.

5. Social Media Ads

Plan now. Win later.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, along with the worst month for retail sales (January), it is the perfect time to focus on mapping out your strategy for 2015. When it comes to your media plan, there are certain steps that are essential to a developing a successful strategy:

- Campaign conception: Your marketing team must first devise the campaign, itself.

- Campaign strategy: You must strategize on the distribution of the campaign message- through which media channels should people receive your company's message?

- Vendor coordination: Once you determine your strategy, connect with different vendors to review their offerings and consider your options.

After determining your media partners, you must complete the following:

- Negotiation: You will need to ensure you get the most bang for your buck by negotiating what space or spots you will receive, while trying to secure the best price for each buy.

- Artwork- After you negotiate the terms of your buy, you must produce artwork of different sizes and formats for the various campaign activations.

- Production: The artwork forms must be created in coordination with production requirements and various media formats.

- Operations coordination: Creative must then be supplied to the media partner with respect to deadlines, clearly and concisely communicating specific posting instructions to ensure creative is posted on time and to avoid any confusion.

- Proofs of posting: Obtain proofs of posting from media partners- this may take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the medium.

- Remediation of any errors: If the media posting is not correctly performed in accordance to the terms of your buy, you must negotiate for a "make good" or some way for them to compensate for the error.

As you probably know, media buying can be a long and complex process for businesses to handle on their own, which is why many choose to work with a professional media buying agency to save time, money and stress. Below are just a few benefits of working with an agency:

- One-stop process: It's more efficient for you to have a single contact for your media plan, rather than managing communication with multiple media vendors when it comes to research, contracting, productions, billing, and any post-buy analyses.

- Cost-efficiency: You can trust that your media dollars will be spent as efficiently as possible, as agencies have established relationships and buying power with vendors.

- Expertise: Working with an agency can allow a broader range of space for an advertisement to appear at the lowest possible rates due to their contractual relationships with media partners formed over the years.

- Time Savings: Handing your strategic media plan over to an agency can save you valuable time allowing you to allocate it towards driving other areas on your business.

Make sense? If so, Marketing Keys is here to help for you to run your business more efficiently. 

 "Clicking" on all cylinders

According to a study conducted by technology and digital-marketing resource provider, Mondo, 80% of companies plan to increase their digital marketing budgets over the next 12-18 months, as digital marketing becomes a significant component of business strategies.  The study, based on an online survey of 262 digital marketing executives, showed that 40% of companies would increase their digital marketing budgets between 5-10%, 32% plan to increase them between 10-15%, and 9% plan to increase them between 0-5%.

An increase in digital marketing budgets can eliminate some of the common challenges faced in the industry, like finding skilled talent, the cost of quality staff, attracting top talent, retaining top talent, and culture fit. Mondo's VP of Digital Marketing Strategy, Lauren McGarrity, mentioned that "turnover has been a really big issue," noting that the average tenure for digital marketing professionals is 12-18 months, while the average CMO tenure is 45 months. With such high demand for talented digital marketing professionals, it seems to be "a candidate's market" as they drift from job to job to find the best opportunity.

Facebook: Less is More.

While many media companies sell as many ads as possible to generate more revenue, Facebook has been able to hike revenue even as it sells fewer ads.  Creating a sense of exclusivity despite its extensive inventory, Facebook's ability to increase prices has led to a 49% boost in overall revenue to $3.85 billion in the most recent quarter- serving 65% fewer ads at an average cost that was 335% higher, compared to that in 2013.

Despite the fact that Facebook has reduced the number of desktop ads displayed on the right rail, as well as the number of news feed ads, which tend to be more expensive, Facebook has still managed to increase its average revenue per user. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has reportedly commented that the decision not to boost the ad business "was a pretty controversial strategy internally," however he said the company has opted to focus on the quality of the ads, rather than the quantity.  

Due to scarcity of Facebook ads, the value of placing ads on Facebook has become more significant. Last quarter, advertisers invested $3.59 billion into advertising on Facebook, a 53% increase from the year before.