Study: Majority of marketers miss the mark with multichannel efforts

Dive Brief:

Majority of marketers are missing opportunities to enhance their brand's effectiveness by 57%, as less than half of tested campaigns (46%) use multichannel strategies, according to an annual AdReaction study by Kantar Millward Brown provided to Marketing Dive. Eighty-nine percent of marketers said their efforts are integrated and well understood across channels, but just 58% of consumers agreed.
Well-integrated campaigns are 31% more effective, while campaigns that are both integrated and customized are 57% more effective, the study found. Integration here refers to the connectivity of elements such as creative materials, characters, logos, messaging and platforms.
At the same time, 71% of U.S. consumers said they think ads are more intrusive than they were three years ago, with 79% saying they're appearing in more places. Kantar Millward Brown surveyed more than 14,000 people ages 16 to 65 in 45 countries on the state of global multichannel advertising. The research was contrasted with results from Kantar's "Getting Media Right" study from September 2017, which included the views of more than 300 marketers.

Dive Insight:

The report highlights a significant disconnect between what consumers expect from multichannel ad campaigns and what marketers are actually delivering. Campaigns need a strong central idea with coherent and consistent imagery and messaging across platforms to avoid fragmentation and yield positive results. Marketers must more carefully take into consideration the variety of platforms and ad formats consumers engage with and tailor content to each in order to offer customization and drive engagement and ROI.

Other areas appear to be improving, according to Kantar Millward Brown. The group's data show that 47% of consumers say ads fit together across different channels better than they did three years ago, and 41% said ads tell better stories today. Consumers are more responsive to multichannel campaigns that have characters and a relatable storyline. The report also finds that all marketing efforts benefit from synergies, but some channels work particularly well together. The strongest integrated combinations are between TV and Facebook and TV and out-of-home.

Marketers can take their efforts a step further by focusing more on personalization, which a separate study by Qubit said may improve customer relationships with brands and add 2x to 14x more incremental revenue per visitor. At the same time, consumers often feel bombarded with marketing content, as nearly three out of four Americans said ads are becoming more intrusive over the years, according to Kantar Millward Brown.

This signals the need for marketers to design compelling campaigns and better understand how to reach consumers in an unobtrusive way on the platforms where they're most receptive or otherwise risk encouraging further adoption of technology like ad blockers.