Facebook op-ed: How marketing must adapt for a post-TV world

In their decision to self-restrict themselves from any pre-watershed advertising, members of the Remote Gambling Association (RGA) have given themselves one of the thorniest questions in all of marketing to answer: how to build, grow and sustain a brand when the first medium on any media plan is off limits? Make no mistake, this is a monumental shift for this industry, and there will be winners and losers.

Key to navigating the choppy waters ahead is to understand the role TV advertising plays for these operators. For while media spend is traditionally viewed through the lens of acquisition, TV advertising delivers across the funnel; whether that’s building brand salience with non-customers, driving direct sign-ups of new customers, or keeping existing customers loyal.

The challenge ahead for marketing departments is to acknowledge those jobs and identify replacement media channels, all the while avoiding the same mistakes that provoked the backlash against their TV spend in the first place.

Those mistakes, it must be clear, were manifold: the industry saturated limited inventory with an exhausting volume of advertising, the tone of said advertising was overbearing and devoid of creativity, and due to the nature of broadcast TV, it reached an unjustifiable number of minors and problem gamblers.

Learn from mistakes

So, how to overcome this challenge? Many digital platforms now allow operators to upload customer lists for exclusion from their paid media campaigns, which can be used to dramatically reduce the exposure of at-risk gamblers. Similarly, identity-led platforms such as Facebook are able to target ads with a high degree of accuracy, ensuring minimal impressions delivered to under 18s when compared with traditional channels. Furthermore, frequency controls can help operators reach their audience, without over-saturating it.

And what of the jobs that TV delivered? They can be broadly bucketed into three areas: acquiring new customers, communicating to existing customers, and brand building.

On the acquisition side, operators have well-developed practices across affiliates, PPC, paid social and beyond – the emphasis here needs to be on scaling volume while focusing attention on the platforms that can offer these capabilities.

A tougher puzzle presents itself with reaching existing customers, however. In the absence of TV, an increased pressure falls on CRM teams to engage existing customers, faced with doing so despite ever declining email open rates and GDPR headwinds. However, investment in identity-led digital channels offers a significant opportunity: to reach and engage your customers with tailored messaging, wherever they spend their time. To fully unlock this opportunity requires a re-engineering of the CRM function, with a greater focus on paid media, and a high level of automation to unlock personalisation at scale.

 Brand building blocks

And yet the greater challenge still will be in replacing the one remaining job of TV advertising: brand building. It is also the one area with the greatest potential for missteps as investment moves online. Well-proven research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute posits that brand building is the result of a sustained investment in delivering a distinct brand message against a broad audience.

This is anathema to many digital marketers, who work week-by-week, pushing whole new creative ideas to tightly-targeted audiences. It requires them to step back from lower-funnel metrics like CTRs and CPA, and back to the fundamentals of marketing like reach and awareness metrics.

To successfully make the leap, marketers must make two commitments. The first is to commit to a distinct brand identity that is not centred around an expensive TV ad, but instead built for a mobile-first world. The second is to internalise that marketing has an impact beyond simply getting customers in the door. That investments in brand building and in retention and loyalty must form part to any marketing strategy.

Brendan Tinnelly works in the Real Money Gaming Team at Facebook, where he advises some of the largest operators on their paid media strategy across Facebook and Instagram