Tourism Australia and IAG might not sound like natural marketing bedfellows, but have a similar approach to how they plan video campaigns across multiple markets, and the role of active and passive attention.
Attention plays a fundamental role in how two of Australia’s largest marketing operations plan their media, in particular digital video versus TV activity.
At the IAB’s Video Summit this week, IAG’s executive manager of channel, performance marketing and effectiveness, Mark Echo, explained that its NRMA brand has built up “Coca-Cola style” awareness and consideration in its home state of NSW – where it has a 99-year old legacy – but it wasn’t the case elsewhere.
In late 2022, IAG’s insurance brands in South Australia (SGIC) and Western Australia (SGIO) rebranded to NRMA Insurance, while in Queensland the NRMA Australia brand has been around for decades but operates in a parochially “Suncorp state”.
This requires a nuanced marketing approach for each state.
“We’ve been on the attention train for at least five years,” Echo said. “We’re playing with the balance of passive and active attention by state. Active attention is very expensive to buy, you need premium placements and I’d love to have those sorts of budgets (but we don’t).
“In New South Wales, we could probably afford to have a passive attention type of video placements, which is cheaper for us to buy and helps nudge the consumer on the journey that we want to put them on. But in South Australia and WA, they’re only just seeing NRMA Blue and their active attention is absolutely what we need to have in bold placements.”
Although the foundations of brand and messaging might be similar for each market, Echo’s team tweaks media plans to active or passive attention needs to ensure the NRMA brand remains top of mind when customers are looking for insurance.
Tourism Australia adopts a similar approach when it comes to planning campaigns across different target markets.
Its challenge is to place brand ‘Australia’ at the top of the consideration set of tourists in target audiences, and at a time of fierce competition from Japan, the Middle East and other tourist hot spots. It recently did this with its Say G’Day campaign (below) that has picked up a slew of awards.
Attention is at the heart of how Tourism Australia plans media and measures campaign success, with activations commonly across screens (TV and digital video) and native content.
“(On attention), in the past couple of years we’ve really been moving away from raw reach and efficient buying reach to that effective play,” Tourism Australia GM of brand, campaign and media Sarah Gallon said.
“We’ve been working with our media partner to create our own Tourism Australia CPM that looks at different strategic inputs, whether it be ROI analysis or the influential channels across the traveller journey.
“We know our comms jobs are going to be different in each market, but this approach allows you to keep your foundations and hone in on how we can drive the most attentive media plans to deliver on our goals.”
Australian plant-based meat company, v2food, is on a different marketing journey and with a much smaller budget.
The five-year old business has the challenge of not only building a young brand, but also growing a new category.
Then there’s overcoming stereotypes about “fake meat” or “meat alternatives”, perceptions that v2food ANZ head of marketing Jade Lish and her team are trying to shift.
“One of the first things we have done since I joined was get rid of all of these terms. We’re now positive about what we are, which is plant-based protein, and the health and the planetary benefits that we bring,” she said.
V2food is on a mission to change Australia’s obsession with meat by convincing carnivores to replace one beef meal each week with a plant-based alternative. This is the core message of the brand’s Update Your Plate campaign (below).
“We use video to really drive that message home,” Lish said. “So we use it on TV to obviously get that mass reach. But also honing in on the audience’s that really do live from the forefront, which is Gen Z and millennials. They’re obviously not the biggest grocery contributor to spend right now but they will be.
“So we’re taking the business on that journey in which they might not see a return from the advertising we’re doing today, but it’s going to pay off in three to five years when they become 50 per cent of grocery spend. And we know Gen Z influences the Gen X grocery basket.”
V2food uses a combination of TV, YouTube, TikTok and digital out of home to balance its mass reach objectives while targeting younger consumers.
Rounding out the panel is Pfizer omnichannel digital manager Hisham Anas who, arguably, had the toughest marketing gig in the room.
He points out that pharmaceuticals are so heavily regulated, every single word and marketing claim is rigorously challenged, and the company cannot directly sell medicine to general public or their healthcare clients.
“You can’t mention the drug name, or anything to do with your branding. So you can only show very generic information about the disease state,” he said. “For doctors, we have to go directly to them with videos, we cannot use the same video as in the public domain.”
Pfizers target audience of doctors and medical specialists numbers 70,000 of which only a fraction might specialise in an area of medicine that is relevant to a Pfizer product or service.
This throws up an attribution headache: “It’s extremely hard to get attribution when it comes to pharmaceuticals. And the reason being is that you can send healthcare professionals emails, videos or your sales rep might visit them but the doctor may see a patient relevant to your campaign…six or seven months later. And to link that to your activity is virtually impossible.”
