Sky’s High Investment in Traditional Media

Recent figures revealed Sky is the latest big brand to increase their 2017 investment in traditional media, including printing, overtaking 2016 top investor P&G with a £197.1m budget. Companies such as Sky, P&G, BT, Tesco and Unilever are putting their faith and marketing spend into printing including direct mail, door drop leaflets, outdoor poster advertising, press, as well as TV, cinema and radio.

Mobile and digital media now account for $200 bn of a $600 bn worldwide advertising spend but there’s a strong counter movement in support of traditional media, including print, with many high profile brands questioning digital placement. 

Commenting on his keynote speech at the last Interactive Advertising Bureau's Annual Leadership Meeting, Marc Pritchard, P&G CEO said “They were seeing increased spending in digital media, but decreased effectiveness; increasing costs, but decreasing sales lift. Then as we started to penetrate that, we were seeing less and less transparency.”

Another factor influencing the swing back to traditional media is the way people perceive traditional vs digital. Edelman’s Trust Barometer found that trust in traditional media, especially in items that had been printed, was up in 2018 whilst search engines and social media are losing consumer confidence. 

A Two Sides (the paper & print environmental website) 2017 international survey of over 10,700 respondents found consumers trust print and gain a deeper understanding when reading print. More consumers believe they gain a deeper understanding of the story when read from print media (65%) over online news sources (49%). In addition, consumers also trust the stories read in printed newspapers (51%) more than stories found on social media (24%). A majority of consumers (76%) also indicated they were concerned about the trend of “fake news”.

Interestingly, online brands such as MoneySupermarket, Confused.com and Google have recognised this trend and increased their traditional media and print spend in 2017. Take a lesson from the “big boys” and invest in a rounded campaign program where digital works in tandem with traditional for maximum impact.