If you were to play a drinking game, taking a shot for every time someone said that fragmented media and audiences made marketers and agencies lives tougher, you’d wind up in hospital pretty quickly.
But rather than pontificating about the topic ad nauseum, which channels are actually driving results for the country’s top marketers. And what can you learn from them?
Specsavers
For Shaun Briggs, Specsavers’ director of marketing planning, the brand shows up best in out-of-home.
“We’ve got a really long history of being able to do that and I would say that is partly us having a really good platform to execute and also partners in media who really want to highlight the creativity and flexibility of their channel,” he told us.
Specsavers’ work in OOH reads like a greatest hits. It’s ‘Airport’ campaign was a resounding success. The van on the bollard was incredible. The papered-over ladder. And even a play on English football fans’ obsession with winning trophies with a huge billboard reading “Its coming home”.
“A one-off execution of our idea is generally powerful enough that without us really having to do anything, gets traction. ‘Airport’ we did nothing other than put them up said ‘let’s see what happens,'” said Briggs.
For Briggs, OOH doesn’t only show the best of its creative but it delivers results on attention.
“Without really knowing or being deliberate about it, we’ve played into this truth that OOH has a quite good ability to get attention. If you’ve already got this aperture able to deliver attention that’s powerful, interesting and doesn’t ask anyone to think too hard, then you make it fast in any context. Talk about a tailwind, it’s a tail-hurricane.”
Despite its success in the medium, Specsavers doesn’t over-invest in OOH.
“About 10 per cent of our budget goes into ‘Should’ve…’ probably should be a bit more. Consideration, we put about 20 per cent of our budget into that, probably should be a bit more. In activation, we’ve still go to do that. Yes we do ‘Should’ve…’ but I’ve got 400, nearly 500 stores across Australia and New Zealand who have optometrists and test rooms that need to have patients in them,” said Briggs.
“The biggest part of what we do is make sure that we get patients and customers in every single day. So lots of really bottom of the funnel work with Google, in biddable, programmatic, audio in all kinds of places. We’ve got a really healthy budget and a lot of it doesn’t go into ‘Should’ve…’.”
Telstra
Telstra’s creative is some of the most celebrated in Australia, attracting international acclaim and scores of awards. However, while its CMO Brent Smart is proud of the work produced with its +61 bespoke agency, not all of it is quite at the same standard—yet, anyway.
Speaking about the telco’s internal creative dial which is used to assess the quality of work in post, Smart said:
“It’s a coaching tool more than anything. The really important thing it does is it level sets everyone on the creative standard we’re shooting for and where’s our current standard at. It creates intellectual honesty on those two topics… I always say great is probably one of the most abused words in marketing. ‘That’s a great campaign’. Is it?” he said.
It’s ‘Better on a better network’ campaign, with its main TVC activation, scored “really well” on Telstra’s creative dial, for instance.
“That more tier-one high-end work, should score well. It’s had a disproportionate amount of time and budget,” said Smart.
Smart and Telstra’s approach to creative changes significantly depending on channel. For instance the ‘Four Bars’ OOH work, of which he’s particularly proud, challenges the audience and his creatives.
“I don’t think you need to dumb it down and make it so obvious, and I think the other thing is that a lot of marketers would want to put everything in there, whereas we spend a lot of time challenging ourselves with what we can take out. Like with ‘Four Bars’, we just stripped it all away and made it as simple and pure as message as you can. Don’t mess it up with copy explaining it’s Australia’s best network,” he said.
By the same token, however, ‘Better…’ needed to have so many different iterations because it was running very frequently during the 2024 Olympics coverage.
Perhaps the tell with Smart and Telstra’s work is that he wants to be held aloft—quite literally.
“Ultimately, I don’t want to put more pollution into the world. I think advertising can be pollution, landfill [but] I think it can actually be, dare I say it, of cultural merit,” he said.
We suggest to Smart that people will happily put Aperol and Campari ads on their walls.
“Yeah. It’s a choice and it’s about ambition. What’s your ambition. There’s a lot of people just doing marketing. I’m not doing marketing. I’m really care about this and I’m really passionate about this. I’ve got big ambitions and it’s a different mindset,” he said.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola’s marketing director for the South Pacific, Kate Miller, has been on a journey with its brands.
“About three-and-a-half years ago, we honed in on what were the big global brands and the local gems. So Coke, Fanta, Sprite and Powerade but we also have Montt Franklin and Kirks that are still part of our prioritisation,” she said.
Coca-Cola, across all its brands is still experimenting on the “right balance” of performance and brand work, according to Miller—noting that no-one in the market has “cracked the formula” yet.
Of course, most of the brands under Coca-Cola’s auspices have incredible brand presence. Just head to Kings Cross in Sydney, for example.
“When the economy is changing, you go into a bit more of a short-term mode sometimes and the business requires it. But as a company we’re pretty good at understanding the role of all elements of marketing and making sure that we maintain some sort of balance,” she said.
However, Coca-Cola has moved some of its brands into a “much more digital space” and is using social and influencers to spruik its soft drinks.
In fact, Miller said Coke has been shifting its spend into digital for a number of years.
“We look at it as a screens buy. Sometimes linear TV can play a role depending on the brand. Are we investing as much in linear TV as we used to? No. Are we investing a lot in screens? Yes. The channels have adapted and moved on and so has our investment,” she said.
“But we look at it on a campaign-by-campaign, brand-by-brand basis. We’ve got a couple of brands that only do social, we’ve got other brands that really benefit from being on screens and sometimes that includes TV as well. We don’t have a blanket rule around it but certainly the shift of our investment but certainly the shift of our investment to digital is significant.”
In fact, 60 per cent of its spend is digital, with Mount Franklin being the main brand with a mainly social focus.
That said, Miller is most proud of Coke Studio—a long, high-touch campaign tapping into the “passion point” of music.
“[Consumers] could be part of forming the lyrics that [the artists] worked on together, you could be part of forming what into the video for the music track, you could be part of the design of the cover track. It gave you a behind-the-scenes for how the choreographer came up with the dances for the videos, the designers and how they did their part. It gave people a triple-A pass behind-the-scenes,” she said.
It’s clear there’s no one-size-fits-all rule for brands to follow these days. Even arguably the greatest purveyor of OOH—Specsavers—spends more time and effort on other campaigns. Telstra, arguably the greatest purveyor of TVCs in Australia is just as proud of its OOH (if not more proud). And Coke, despite its legendary OOH billboards is moving to digital. Who knows where we’ll be by the end of the decade.
