Tel: +353 1 232 0239    |    email: info@mcconkey.media

Advertising & Marketing

Menu

Whatever the medium,
Make sure it's well done.

In a rapidly changing industry, the key to staying ahead is staying on top of developments – from demographics to analytics, from publications to legislation. Here we share our observations on some of the articles we have found useful and also some industry news and updates.

Review of BCAP’s guidance on the use of superimposed text in TV advertising

 

Revisions to the guidance will set a higher bar in the following areas:

 Particularly significant qualifying information should be given sufficient emphasis; this may include holding certain information on screen for longer.
 A stricter approach to contrast between the supers and background should be taken.
 Use of shadowing and edging effects to improve legibility will be further discouraged owing to its potential to blur text.
 Greater care should be taken over the choice of typeface to avoid the use of ‘stretched’, elongated text.
 Supers should be placed at the bottom of the screen and centred.
 Shorter, centred supers are preferable to the use of full-line supers.
 Marketers must take care to avoid a detrimental impact on viewers when their attention is drawn to other ad content, including imagery or written messaging, at the same time as a super.
 Where numbers are presented in a super, viewers should not be expected to make additional calculations in order to have full understanding of the information presented.

There will be a two-stage transitional period. The revised guidance will come into effect on 1 March 2019. Initially, the ASA will seek to resolve cases informally, issuing advice based on the guidance to advertisers on how to improve potentially problematic supers. It will start to consider cases formally from 1 September 2019.

Read the full document here BCAP guidance

https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/cap-s-regulatory-statement-on-superimposed-text.html

Top 50 TV for 2018

Top Programmes 2018

Below is the list of the Top 50 Programmes on Televsion in Ireland in 2018. The highest rating of all programmes in 2018 was The Late Late Toy Show again1. Interestingly when it comes to entertainment shows, Room to Improve, Mrs Browns Boys and I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here all performed exceptionally well, making it into the top 15 shows of the year1.  Home-produced programmes and soaps continued to dominate the top of the ratings chart across all channels.

Sport was a big winner this year again accounting for more than half of the top 50 programmes of the year.  Ireland’s Grand Slam 6 Nations clash against England was the most watched sporting programme of the year.

Weather plays a big role in Irish life and this was reflected in the TV viewing data.  The Beast from the East hit us for a week in March meaning we stayed glued to our sets for an incredible average of 4hr 5mins every day during that week2.

Looking at the Top 50 programmes we can see that “Live” programmes and Events are what audiences want to watch and that’s where a key strength of TV broadcasters lies. TV broadcaster’s ability to provide this content to mass audiences is what makes TV stand out as the super medium.

Source: TAM Ireland Ltd / Nielsen TAM
1 Top Programmes based on Individuals 4+, All Subscribing Channels,  Averaging Option: Any Day, Any Time, Best Episode, Minimum Duration 10 Minutes
2 Based on Average Daily Viewing for week of 26th February – 4th March 2018
Analysis based any time, any  day, best episode.

The battleground for your Screentime starts here …

@MarkRitson used this Morgan Stanley chart showing Australian advertising spend by medium over the last 5 decades to demonstrate how the Internet (essentially #facebook and #alphabet) has hammered Newsprint.

 

The battleground for your screentime begins in earnest with Amazon looking to eat the established players Lunch.

Thanks to @eirSport and #TAM_Ireland for hosting a stimulating gig at the Aviva

#advertisingworksandneedstosellitselfbetter

Ritson also used this chart from Les Binet and Peter Field which shows the incremental sales effectiviness of long term brand building – using a lead and secondary medium – and not just tactical direct advertising in your brand campaigns.

View 10 charts from Les_Binet and_Peter_Field

It’s also worth referring to this Ebiquity study when planning your 2019 activity too.

Know your WTF from your NSFW

  • The short story of a brief dictionary of digital terms and how to get your free copy

We’ve all been there.  The moment when the conversation veers to some phrase or cluster of letters that everyone else except you seems to understand.  Depending on your audience, do you laugh and nod as if you know what they are talking about, swiftly change the subject, or surreptitiously tap the words into a search engine when no-one is looking?

You probably know YOLO and eventually realised that LOL was laugh out loud and not lots of love (which it used to be!), maybe you know NIMBY, BAE or IMHO, but what about LA, KYC, ICYMI or IO?  It’s impossible to know everything, but with more and more acronyms in common usage at work, are you keeping up or even keeping pace?  Maybe you deal with it by going AWOL, throwing shade or ROLF.

Indeed, you may not realise that some words are acronyms at all, so completely they have been swallowed by the English language, such as SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), TASER (Thomas A. Swifts Electric Rifle), RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging), IMAX (Image Maximum) or SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics).  Some acronyms such has TAG have up to as many as 129 different meanings.

Industrialisation of the military in the 1940’s was a major driver of acronyms into the English vocabulary – largely because of new technologies and complicated names, but abbreviations have moved apace since then.  People want to communicate and be understood with the minimum of effort and we do this by fitting as much text as possible into as small a space as possible, by pressing the least number of buttons that we can. One emoji now paints a picture and the urban dictionary is constantly evolving.

These days, you need to know your IRL from your HTML, but if you don’t, integrated communications agency McConkey Associates can help you out with that. They have put together a brief dictionary of digital terms to shine a light for those of us who need a bit of enlightening, so are you literate in contemporary shorthand?

If you aren’t sure about your MFA, CSS, API, DSP or SSP, get a free copy of ‘Know Your WTF from Your NSFW: A brief dictionary of digital terms’ from McConkey Associates by contacting info@mcconkey.media. Please state whether you’d like a soft or hard copy and include your name, email and postal address.

The Press strand of the Ebiquity Research

Here is the Ebiquity Media Effectiviness Research quoted by NewsBrands as it relates to Press:

RE-EVALUATING-MEDIA-for-Newsbrands-Ireland-May-18

As with most offline media, Ebiquity shows Newspapers rank highly (3rd) for ROI but are rated poorly (8th) by Marketeers.

NewsBrands commissioned RAM to conduct this “reAction Study at the end of March to evaluate the effectiveness of Irish Press and publish the results of 5 case studies.

  • Interesting to note that 1/4 pages recall scores are 50% higher in 2018 than 2013 – probably due to less clutter in the Newspaper environment.
  • Press is a highly Trustworthy medium along with TV & Radio.
  • Social Media is not trustworthy but highly intrusive.
  • The Medium is and has been very very poor at promoting its strengths to the Industry.

Advertisers need  to be sure their Media Planning is Neutral and unbiased from perception or planner’s age discrimination.

Download our review of the 2018 Irish Newsprint and Magazine Market.

 

 

 

 

Fed up with GDPR emails?

Interesting article from the FT on GDPR and the differences of opinion from leading Legal experts on what you should and should not do. It suggests you should hold your nerve and once you offer an “unsubscribe” option on any digital communications that should cover your responsibilities in bulk emails.

Here is one marketeer’s approach emailed today, definitely a lesson in how to lose most of your mailing list – without the click of a button:

 

2018 Print & Press Review

• As could be expected, Newspaper sales fell further in 2017. The circulation of daily print titles was 8.2% lower in the second half than on the same period the year losing some 34K copies a day.
• The print circulation of The Irish Times now stands at 61,049 copies, down 7.8 per cent year on year.
• The Irish Times Digital Edition (a digital replica of the daily newspaper) had daily sales of 16,939 for the period up
29% yoy, The growth in digital edition sales meant the combined sale for the print and digital editions of The Irish
Times declined 2 per cent year on year, arriving at 77988 copies. The IT claim 72,000 of its sales as subscription!
• Irish Independent: Print circulation fell 7.2 per cent year on year to 90107 and the Herald, its sister paper, saw its sales fall 11.6 per cent to 36097.
• The Irish Examiner now sells an average of 27589 copies. It remains to see if this will be absorbed as the Cork edition of the Irish Times.

• The Times (Ireland) launch managed to lift its circulation to 10,109 copies, up from the London Times circulation of 2593 copies. I suspect most of these are free (to Bank of Ireland customers).
• The Irish Daily Mail at 37,351 copies is down (with the Irish Mail on Sunday at 74,392 also down) believed to be the
result of bulk circulations not being reflected in the figures.
• Sunday Newspapers lost 36,760 copies a week, retreating 6.1 per cent.
• The Sunday Independent is still the top selling Sunday but its circulation has stayed below the 200,000 mark at
178,323 – 6.9 per cent lower than at the end of 2016.
• The circulation of the Sunday World fell 10.4 per cent year on year to 133,946
• The Sunday Times fell 1.2 per cent year on year to 75534.
• The Sunday Business Post’s circulation is close to where it was a year ago at 29619.

Download our print friendly review here