Customer engagement with ad campaigns dropping
Consumer engagement with cross-channel ad campaigns is in decline, partly due to marketers losing sight of their key task of generating demand, says a new report from Fournaise Marketing Group.
The report tracked Fournaise’s large, SME and agency clients across all media in 20 countries worldwide and found that cross-channel ad campaigns generated 19% less customer response and engagement in the first half of 2011, compared with the previous year.
Online display and sponsorship were hit badly with a 26% and 35% decrease respectively.
B2B and b2c campaigns were both affected.
Fournaise attributes the fall in engagement rates to financial caution from consumers and businesses.
It is also due to ad campaigns themselves being less effective and marketers focusing too much on “creativity” and new media, rather than taking a “pragmatic approach” and focusing on the customer benefits and competitive strengths of their products, according to the report.
“At a time when CEOs and stakeholders are asking marketing to achieve better results and a better marketing ROI to get more customer demand, a 19% decrease in advertising response is alarming” says Jerome Fontaine, CEO & chief tracker of Fournaise.
“We also noticed too many traditional marketers lost sight of the fact that the job of their ad campaigns is to generate customer demand for their products/services, not to just look pretty and clever in the media”.
