Surround-sound, or 360 degree or integrated marketing campaigns have become hot topics in the last few years and have enabled marketers to design and deliver very effective marketing campaigns.
Surround-sound marketing and psychologics
Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart describe the process in detail in their book ‘What Sticks,’ but let me give a brief overview here. At a high level the interaction between media is more than just providing multiple touches about a specific message. The idea is that the messages are reinforced between each other. In particular, the concept of ‘psychologics’ means that, for example, a print ad actually helps the mind conjure up the imagery of a corresponding, previously viewed TV ad. Because of this the value of the print ad is actually higher than the value of a print ad where there was no corresponding TV imagery. This is probably the reason why many non-TV ads are improperly attributed to TV because they trigger the mind to conjure up the images from the TV commercial.
If, for the moment, we leave aside the active or passive exposure to a media type and if we assume that the viewing of a commercial on television delivers the most imagery, because it has both video and audio components, then it should be that a single viewing has the largest influence. Radio has only an audio component. Print has a visual and written component (and sometimes odor), but does require more active participation to read and absorb the message in the ad. In this case in order to get the biggest bang for the buck out of a surround sound marketing campaign, then the most imagery oriented ad should be run first followed by the other media.
Traditional media analytics may be wrong
This has a lot of implications to help marketers improve media buying and flighting. It also has implications of how marketers measure the results of their surround-sound marketing campaigns. Simply correlating impressions of the various media elements to bumps and wiggles in the outputs may provide incorrect conclusions as to what is working and what isn’t.
We now need to know which consumers actually saw one ad only, two ads from different media and so on. Only with this detailed viewership model can we truly see how effective one media channel is versus another.
If you have any comments on this I would love to hear them. Please let me know.
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