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Sep
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The Importance of Planning Local and Buying National
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, digital ooh
While I really did disconnect while on vacation, I did happen to read a piece in the Globe and Mail (National Canadian Newspaper - Yes I still read them occasionally when disconnected from email and Internet access in the not so rough Canadian wilderness).
The piece was written by Konrad Yakabuski in the Marketing section of the Report on Business. It can be found here. The article was entitled “How Pepsi Won Quebec” and has lessons that would benefit many planners and buyers in how they approach the Digital OOH segment of their plans because Pepsi’s success is so based on their targeted advertising - both creative and use of media. As the Quebecois/Quebecers love to say, and I’ll steal their line: DOOH is distinct 
more after the break…
Here’s the rub of the whole success story: Coke, in approaching the Quebec market, has always simply translated their English spots into French and run them, expecting the same results and keeping all messaging consistent across media and geography. Pepsi, on the other hand, has specialized its media and creative to the Quebec market, which tends to have different tastes and needs as an audience.
Example Creative:
Some results/timeline:
- 1984 - Pepsi lagged Coke by 15%
- 1984 - Quebec (read: Targeted) focused ads began
- 1986 - Pepsi leads Quebec by almost 12%
- 1990 - Pepsi leads Quebec by almost 20%
- …they still lead to this day and haven’t changed their distinct ads they run in Quebec
Pepsi’s agency is BBDO (Montreal), an Omincom company. BBDO (both Canada and US) has been on a tear over the last few years especially, racking up some impressive account wins and awards for a lot of their work.
In any other major medium other than Internet, this type of strategy is tough to accomplish…unless you’re Digital OOH. Producing TV spots is FAR too expensive to do regionally in a multi-market environment and buying media in other mediums is far too time consuming to do region by region - which makes it unprofitable for media agencies to accomplish and far too risky….there’s just too many moving parts and too mainly failure points and no planner is going to risk his/her career in trying to jump in head first.
Digital OOH has the built in capacity to customize messaging by region and distribution to multiple points is fairly easy, making it able to accommodate planner/buyer needs and easy to change if something isn’t working or there’s a problem. Producing creative for the medium is also very efficient compared to TV production (notice I said efficient, not cheap….good creative still costs money)
What’s impressive here and what I want to highlight is the results and the abilities the Digital OOH medium can provide to planners.
- By targeting messaging by a region, Pepsi went from a No. 2 behind by 12 points to the number 1, ahead by 20 points in 7 years. This is unheard of in such a short period but possible using the right medium.
- Today’s agencies know they can’t do mass distribution of media and creative the way they used too, going forward, if they want to keep ahead for their clients. The major mediums aren’t going away but there’s too many targeting and localization issues that we, the audience, keep throwing their way…buying the way they used to is creating “reach inefficiencies” that need to be solved somehow. Agencies NEED hyper-targeting AND hyper-local advertising abilities. The challenge is, it needs to be manageable and easy buy…it needs to be manageable underneath a national “plan”. As a Network, you need to spend a lot of time understanding how to do this. Hence the title of the post, “Planning Local, Buying National.
- Messaging can be managed not only by region, but by venue type. You can create a campaign that actually has tweaked messaging in each distinct venue type…i.e. you can pull together creative that all fits together under one theme but says slightly different things in a Dr Office, vs a Pharmacy, vs a gym, vs a Spa. Done creatively, you could tell a fantastic story across multiple channels…this is why it’s so important to have creative agencies pay attention to our medium…there’s a great opportunity here for them.
The main message I want to get across, however, is how effective a planned program of regionalized messaging can have a dramatic impact if you build it into a sustained program. There will be adopters of the DOOH medium over the next couple of years who recognize this potential and will make large leaps in market share based on the extra time they spend in customizing messaging to both region and to venue type…it’s really not that hard.
The secondary message for planners is how bloody easy it is to do in DOOH for much lower risk and price (not cost ) than other mediums.
The article that Konrad wrote goes on to highlight other Canadian brands who take a “distinct” approach to the Quebec market with some success. Take a read and give some thought to how you could approach this with your brands/clients.
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