“It’s been a favorite question among marketing pundits, and the consensus today is that advertisers need brand building and performance marketing to work in unison to make the most of every touchpoint and engage their target audiences at every step of the consumer journey,” Nielsen says. “Long-term success, after all, is built one transaction at a time. But what’s the right channel mix to get the job done?”
Research has found that how a company allocates media dollars largely depends less on a specific media mix and more on the size of its media budget. Nielsen says it examined advertisers in two key industries — retail and automotive — utilizing Nielsen Ad Intel data from more than 100,000 retail and auto brands. The aim was to see how companies are distributing their media dollars today based on the budget they have available.
“Retailers that spent over $100 million last year invested 46% of their budget in traditional channels like TV and radio,” Nielsen says. “This is an average of course — some top advertisers like Lowe’s and Macy’s allocated much more, while others like Amazon or Shein much less — but it shows that retail brands with big budgets still rely on traditional channels to tell their story and reach their target customers at scale.” Nielsen continues: “It’s even more pronounced for auto companies, where the top car manufacturers (like Toyota, GM or Hyundai) collectively spent 70% of their media budget on traditional channels.”
- Advertisers with small budgets — including many local businesses — tend to split their budgets like the top brands: 45%-55% to traditional channels among retailers, and 60%-70% among automotive brands.
- Meanwhile, medium-sized advertisers (retailers or brands that spend $5 million to $50 million each year), spend a much greater share of their media budget on digital channels vs. those with bigger and smaller budgets.
Nielsen says “radio is definitely a big part of the channel mix for medium-sized companies, as is outdoor advertising for small businesses. Print too remains an important channel for medium-sized retailers.”
Source: insideradio.com