Month: February 2022

With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, many marketers have made commitments to increase their investments in Black-owned media. The social justice movement has also inspired all consumers—not just diverse consumers—to expect brands and businesses to do more to support social causes, including through the messages in their advertising. Advertising in diverse-owned media often allows brands to better engage diverse audience segments and hyperfocus messaging. But now that brands are making the commitments, how can they ensure that their dollars are truly making a difference?

The first step is to raise the visibility of the diverse media suppliers that exist so they have a fair and equitable chance to get in front of ad buyers. Advertisers who want to respond to calls for social justice with commitments to spend more on diverse media know that it’s about more than just targeting diverse consumers. Prioritizing diverse-owned and diverse-operated media is a way to break through systemic barriers within the billion-dollar advertising industry for diverse media suppliers. This, in turn, creates a more equitable playing field for historically excluded media outlets to compete with the larger media companies. Some diverse media owners have even taken matters into their own hands. Group Black, for example, a collective and business accelerator for Black-owned media, launched to deepen the pipeline of Black-owned media companies, supported by a $75 million ad-spend target from ad agency WPP.

Identifying all the players in the diverse-owned media market and showing the value of their audience is another critical step. Nielsen is working with industry organizations such as ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) and Media Framework MAVEN to identify and provide aggregated metrics on the reach and audience profiles of validated and certified diverse/minority owned media so marketers and agencies can discover and build partnerships with these companies. 

Creating measurement parity for diverse-owned media companies will also require better measurement tools. Nielsen has been closing this gap by revisiting its reporting and pricing policies to include more diverse media suppliers. Since November 2021, the Nielsen local TV service includes audience estimates of full power, non-subscribing minority-owned and nonprofit TV stations. Additionally, minority-owned radio stations that qualify for exempt status, are also reported in the Nielsen Audio in Summary Data Sets, regardless of subscriber status. Nielsen is working directly with diverse media suppliers to deliver greater transparency and more granular metrics that advertisers are looking for. One example is Canela Media, a Latina-owned media company, which has tripled the number of campaigns measured with Nielsen as a part of the pilot program. 

Advertisers can also lean in to ensure that there is long-term systemic change, and that their increased investment is not just a “check the box.” General Motors, which has pledged to allocate 4% of its U.S. advertising budget to Black-owned media companies by 2022, plans to double that to 8% by 2025. One of the challenges for emerging diverse-owned media companies is that some are not officially certified as a minority business, so investments made with them may not count toward an advertiser’s diverse spend goals. Nielsen has collaborated with P&G to seed a fund with the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC). This fund supports the certification process, expanding the pipeline of diverse owned media officially defined as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE). The more diverse media owners defined as an MBE, the more opportunity for ad spend to be included in an advertiser’s diverse investment goals.

It’s clear why companies have made the commitment to increase ad spend with diverse media. Making the biggest impact with those dollars takes a bigger commitment to truly understanding the diverse media landscape and how to win with consumers. With an increasingly fragmented media landscape, investing in diverse-owned media is a winning long-term strategy for advertisers. 

Additional Resources

Diverse-Owned Media Reach and Audience Profiles

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To learn more, contact Nielsen.

No one likes to wait. It’s human nature. And the fast-paced nature of our lives today, amplified by the speed that digital connectivity facilitates, only heightens the pressure to move faster—in all facets of our daily lives. The same is true in business: Connectivity, digital technology and high-speed communication inherently accelerates the pace of how we work. And this is particularly true in marketing. Yet depending on a brand’s goals, it might be time to make some adjustments.

Brands have hundreds of options to choose from when they think about their marketing technology, and they’ve leaned into these options heavily in recent years. In fact, conversion-focused marketing has been the industry darling for some time now. And when the pandemic arrived and brands pulled back on mass media campaigns, that digital focus sharpened even more.

COVID-19 aside, digital growth-focused strategies drive sales in this quarter, not the next. Importantly, a focus on near-term sales—and the ability to measure the impact of conversion marketing—serves to grow investments in these strategies. And marketers are quick to confirm that they’re steadily increasing their financial spending across conversion-oriented channels at much greater rates than more traditional channels, such as linear TV and radio. According to our 2021 Annual Marketing report, marketers surveyed planned to earmark their largest spend increases to social media, search, online/mobile video and email.

Importantly, all brands should develop holistic, well-balanced marketing strategies that map to specific business objectives and outcomes. But when brand awareness and customer acquisition are key business goals, conversion-dominated strategies are going to deliver limited results. These strategies also stand in opposition to numerous academic studies that claim upper-funnel marketing is the best path to growth. Notably, the marketers surveyed for our most recent marketing report rank brand awareness and customer acquisition as their top priorities, which stands in opposition to where their increased spending is headed.

The downside of our accelerated lifestyles is that it’s easier (and quicker) to drive sales than build out campaigns aimed at mass reach that will take longer to yield positive results. Measuring long-term sales is also different and many marketers rank the effectiveness of traditional mass media lower than digital channels.

From a consumer perspective, our recent Trust in Advertising study found that consumers have more trust in many forms of traditional media than digital options. And while our most recent marketing report notes that many brand marketers cited challenges in measuring the return of their investments in traditional media like TV, radio and print, Nielsen experience base shows that on average, a 1-point gain in brand metrics, such as awareness and consideration, drives a 1% increase in sales. So if a brand generates $100 million in annual sales, that 1-point gain would equal an additional $1 million in sales. 

Upper-funnel efforts also generate an array of ancillary benefits that can drive the efficiency of sales activations. For example, Nielsen recently measured how effective a financial services company’s marketing efforts were at driving sales across approximately 20 markets. At the onset, brand awareness and consideration for the brand varied across the different markets. At the end of the study, Nielsen found that the correlation between the upper funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency was exceptionally strong (0.73). Accordingly, brands may find it worthwhile to build equity not only for the direct benefits to sales, but also for the indirect benefit coming from improving the efficiency of activation efforts.

There is no short-selling the importance of establishing relationships with consumers and nurturing them with meaningful, personal engagements. In a world of growing choice and fleeting loyalty, brands need strategies to fortify their relationships with existing consumers, and digital channels are critical for those endeavors. For true brand growth and long-term business viability, however, marketers need to balance their conversion-efforts with initiatives that put their value proposition in front of consumers that aren’t yet familiar with them.

Related research

• Report: Take command of your brand
• Report: Era of adaptation
• Trust in advertising study