According to Nielsen Media Research data analysed by Thinkbox, investment in TV advertising by online brands has grown by £170 million in the last five years, averaging annual growth of 172 per cent. Last year, a total of 239 online brands advertised on TV, spending more than £180 million – up from under £10 million in 2004, when just 34 online brands advertised on TV.

TV advertising* now accounts for 71.5 per cent of onlines’ measured advertising investment.

So what’s behind the strong and steady increase in TV advertising investment from online brands?

David Brennan, research and strategy director at Thinkbox, says when it comes to media choices that drive results, online brands are voting with their budgets.

“It is further proof of TV’s healthy commercial relationship with the internet. TV drives online response better than any other media channel”, says Brennan.

The Nielsen figures support Brennan’s comments, highlighting the confidence that online companies have in TV as a highly effective driver of online traffic. And for good reason - 94 per cent of UK consumers claim to have gone online as a direct result of watching TV within the last 12 months, according to Thinkbox research.

According to Rhys McLachlan, managing partner of implementation and futures at MediaCom, it’s not only TV's ability to generate online traffic that makes it the main ad channel for online brands - it's also TV's proven capacity to build brands.

McLachlan says, “TV remains unparalleled in its ability to build brands and drive brand equity and affinity. Web brands inevitably harness its unique brand-building power to help establish their own brand equity, with even the most famous of all web brands, Google, turning to TV recently.”  

Google, the most famous online brand in the world, recently took the advertising and marketing community by surprise by running its first ever major TV spot for Google Search during this year’s Super Bowl. Google had long been a proponent of word-of-mouth and non-traditional marketing techniques, but could not resist the lure of the opportunity to “share [the ad spot] with a wider audience,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The increasing incidence of ‘two-screen viewing’ (consuming both TV and online content simultaneously) has also contributed to growth in online brands advertising on TV. In this context, TV can function as a point-of-sale medium for online companies, whose brands can go from initial awareness, straight to purchase, during the course of one commercial break. Thinkbox research found 54 per cent of the broadband-enabled population say they watch TV while they're also online, on a daily basis.

Amelia Torode, head of strategy and innovation at advertising agency VCCP, says, “The best campaigns seamlessly weave on and offline together while making the most of the participation potential of individual channels.”

While Google may have dominated media attention thanks to its recent foray into the world of TV advertising, the trend of online brands investing in TV has not developed overnight – and at the rate of growth illustrated by Nielsen’s figures, the trend is more than likely to continue.

Source: www.thinkbox.tv  *Excluding search advertising

Published March 2010