The TV Commercial Conundrum
There was some information released from Marketing Sherpa this week that I have to admit, surprised me quite a bit. Apparently, according to a survey of marketers who currently use video ads, only 30% of respondents ever actually test a video ad using a free medium. It seems to me that big brand marketers are an odd breed… These folks will spend tens of thousands of dollars on production of a television commercial that backlashes on them faster than a boomerang, without bothering to take the smallest step toward a viable test market… You Tube.
On another site, I commented about all the uproar over the BK-Spongebob commercial, which seemed to me the latest in a string of missed crowdsourcing opportunities for Burger King. Another famous backlash commercial was the Motrin commercial that ticked off a certain micro-segment of the “mom” market and resulted in Johnson & Johnson yanking the commercial completely (after paying for production and air time) and posting an apology on the Motrin web site, all because a relative “handful” of internet-connected, socially-active moms felt insulted and started talking about boycotts.
Why don’t these ads get tested in front of the right groups? I heard one TV marketer observe that “pre-releasing” television commercials lessened the “impact of the message.” What? Aren’t you the same people who tell us that you have to see an ad seven million times before we remember what it’s advertising? How can additional free exposure be a bad thing for a video ad?
Marketers, you have, in the internet, the perfect, completely FREE, perpetual focus group, if you’d just learn how to use it. If you’re a big-dollar marketing firm and you don’t include this sort of testing in your video ad production process, you might want to take another look – you no longer have an excuse to be ignorant of the immediate feedback potential of free video streaming sites as viable test beds. Don’t ignore the potential to let the audience tell you exactly what they most want to see from your next commercial.
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