Why 74% is not a good number

Fan Chen Yip is a good man, but he doesn’t bring good news.

I was reading a news article dated late June 2024 where he and IPG projected digital ad spend to be 74% of all ad spend in Malaysia for 2024.

That’s an adex value of rm 6.7 billion from a total of rm 9 billion.

And in 5 years, IPG expects that number to reach 83% of all Malaysian adex.

I was lucky enough to be in the digital space 24 years ago, when I started my first company in Mumbai. Back then digital was less than 1% of all adex in India.

We felt like digital evangelists in a traditional media desert, crying ourselves hoarse trying to get people to try digital. We have come a long way since then, both India and especially Malaysia.

So why then today do I feel 74% is not good news?

1. Unprecedented lack of strategy:

Digital is a platform, it’s not a media or creative strategy. By putting so much emphasis on digital, clients and agencies are, in many ways, taking the easy way out.

The “strategy” becomes just the fact of going digital, and it will reassure the stakeholders because it can generate vast decks of post campaign numbers. Just being present in digital has become enough: but the lack of strategic planning and a clear way to stand out in digital is very apparent.

We as an industry are just not thinking hard enough how to differentiate our brands amongst the 3000+ messages that the average consumer receives every day.

Do you remember the last 5 ads you saw on Youtube? Thought not.

Can you think of any big brand (Fortune 1000 or Bursa 100), that is consistently doing a good job on digital, going beyond the functional? Thought not.

2. Digital is short lived:

Overall brand awareness and engagement is not growing, beyond temporary spikes. It has been proven repeatedly that going full steam ahead in digital does not move the needle significantly in long term brand-building.

Brands like adidas and Procter and Gamble have admitted they went too digital, focused too much on performance, and now find themselves dialling back. They are spending more now to raise brand awareness and affinity, and are using traditional mediums too.

3. Traditional media has its merits: 

TV is a great medium for bringing people together, and ad breaks on TV, often derided, are still a better bet statiscally to get your brand noticed, compared to YouTube.

Data studies conducted by our team of data scientists in Malaysia show that the recall of an ad on TV is generally for a longer time than for the same ad on YouTube.

Outdoor still delivers credibility, brand awareness and scale. “Big brand feel” and “leadership” are clearly benefits of buying Outdoor ads.

Radio is a great medium when you are feeling lonely, driving to work, or want to tune out mentally. It also conveys news to consumers and creates a vibrant feel. It’s a medium that cannot drive brand awareness, lacking visual appeal, but it is a good tactical and reminder medium.

Cinema is an immersive experience, and possibly a space where people forget their phones for an hour or two. How rare and precious is that?

4. Traditional media skillsets are disappearing: 

Along with ageism, and the focus on youth, traditional media skillsets and personnel are disappearing from the industry. That’s a lacunae of experience, wisdom and marketing capability.

Once these people leave, the experience has walked out of the door with them, and cannot be easily captured.

So then those mediums will languish further, in a perpetuating vicious cycle, which doesn’t improve matters in the future.

5. Integrated beats digital focus: 

An integrated campaign, cutting across multiple consumer touchpoints, can be 3x-5x as effective as standalone advertising.

It works better when there is a new brand to be launched, or when awareness is a key goal, or there is a complex sales cycle, when the marketer needs to move the consumer along the sales funnel.

So, the wheel has come full circle. From being an evangelist for digital, I now find myself an evangelist for using more than one medium, and for more multi-platform consumer experiences and engagements.

It’s a lesson life teaches you, that the circle comes around.

Marketers and agencies need to go beyond blinkered or simplistic thinking, and need to understand how consumers have changed, and are now more complex and have more ability to grasp content and information from multiple platforms.

It makes life more complicated, but isn’t that the fun of it?

Perhaps I need to find Fan and share this good news with him.

Sandeep Joseph is the CEO and co-founder of Ampersand Advisory, Campaign Global Media Independent Agency of the Year and FT Statista 500 High Growth Companies Asia Pacific 2023, 2024. He can be reached at [email protected]

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