Whilst many of us grew up with just a handful of TV channels to entertain ourselves, young people today have literally an arsenal of different mediums at their disposal.
With a whole generation now grown up in the digital age, panelists discussed what broadcast linear TV can do to attract young demos at today’s Future of TV advertising event, held in Sydney.
For Jackie Edwards at Orion Worldwide, the problem lies in a lack of awareness.
“My 10-year-old doesn’t know the brands Channel Seven, Channel Nine and Network 10. He’s the first generation that grew up with a screen always on him.
“So how do you bring him back into linear TV when he doesn’t know what it is? He only knows about subscription services: he knows Disney, he knows Netflix but the first place he goes is to YouTube”.
Diane Ho from Network 10 flatly refuted Edward’s claim that young people are not using or aware of linear platforms.
“I think the facts are really important in terms of numbers. So even if you look at younger demographics, you know, in that 18 to 39 demo, there are still 6.3 million people watching total TV.”
She added that “young people really do follow the content.”
“If you can serve really amazing content to the right audience, they will find you. The role that we have as broadcasters and content creators, is to keep them within our ecosystem. So we do have to think differently about the way that we talk to those younger audiences, because ultimately, they are different.”
She went on to say that it is partly an issue of perception, whilst young viewers engage with the content they might not always be aware of .
For Val Morgan’s Guy Burbidge, the issue can be that media buyers have got used to buying sweeping demos rather than focusing on younger viewers.
“ A total of 52 per cent of our audience is sub-40, but only 8 per cent of the campaigns that we run, specifically target that demographic. Why is that? I think people are just very comfortable in buying big lump demographics at the moment. And we’re trying to shift the conversation away from those big broad demos to a more high-value audience conversation.”
In a seperate panel discussion, speakers from Optus, Colonial First State and Mutinex discussed the metrics that marketers really care about.
“Media metrics mean nothing” Joshua Grace, chief customer officer at Colonial First State said, in reference to the measurements commonly used in the industry such as impressions split by different mediums.
Mutinex provides is so powerful because it really shows the “dollar impact of what marketing can do,” Grace went on.
Led by Henry Innis, Mutinex is a SaaS platform that combines data from across different media platforms.
Cameron Luby, head of consumer marketing at Optus concurred with Grace, saying that whilst media metrics are useful in tweaking campaigns for different mediums, ultimately they do not help so much in terms of gaining marketing spend and showing the business value of marketing.
Meanwhile, data from Mutinex has meant that Luby is able to correlate brand tracking with sales (there is a 78 per cent correlation).
“That kind of number is increasingly valuable to us internally,” he said.
