For many brand oriented companies, there is still a huge dependence on traditional marketing channels such as TV, radio and print to get their message out.  This dependence is like a drug habit that is hard to kick!

I think larger companies that spend the majority of their marketing budget on TV campaigns, are worried that if they reduce this spend then they will see a significant reduction in their sales revenue.

I would like to challenge this argument with the following points.

• How do you measure the ROI for TV Campaigns?  TV advertising does of course have its own set of measurement metrics.  Companies running TV campaigns will be familiar with metrics such as audience universes, Campaign Reach, Campaign Impact, TOMA (Top of mind awareness) etc.  These metrics are all great BUT... they are all based on a sampling technique.  For example in Ireland, RTE (in partnership with Nielson) place a Peopleometer in a number of homes to analyse the viewing habits of a sample audience.  They then extrapolate this sample data to provide statistics for your campaign. In effect your data is based on the viewing habits of 1800 people in 670 homes.

"That's not to say that there is no role for traditional marketing campaigns"

We have found that an integrated campaign incorporating offline and online marketing can yield some great results.  We recently ran a campaign for a client over a six week period.  Our online marketing initiatives included running a  PPC campaign on Google and a Facebook advertising campaign.  Although the majority of our visitors came from the search engines you can see from the chart that 12.99% (accounting for approximately 2,000 visitors) came directly to the website.  This was primarily due to the TV campaign that ran for a 2 week period.

By integrating traditional marketing initiatives you can start measuring results which will help you determine which campaign elements are working best.