Changing perceptions about a brand is one of the hardest tasks an advertiser has to address.  They have to erase current association, beliefs and feelings about a brand and replace them with new ones. This task demands a medium that can create powerful new associations and rewire the brain, like TV.

Repositioning is often about confronting negativity as in the transformation of Marks and Spencer in the ‘Your M&S’ campaign, or the Skoda case study below.  But sometimes it’s about changing the market sector and reasons for consumption.  Remember when Lucozade was a drink for sick children?  Its transformation into a sports drink was achieved largely through TV.

Sponsorship can be a highly effective and subtle way of repositioning a brand.  The implicit associations with a programme brand can transfer to the brand successfully when more overt claims in spot advertising might be rejected.  Bailey’s Irish Cream famously transformed itself into a very sensuous drink through its long-running sponsorship of Sex in the City.

Click here to see how Skoda managed a successful repositioning
Click here to see how Ryvita repositioned their brand from boring health food to healthy snack

 Not all advertising is about consumption.  Sometimes it’s about trying to persuade people to change what they do; Tesco’s initiative to save plastic bags was an immediate success using TV to motivate us to do our bit to address global warming.  Some behavioural change campaigns have to challenge long-term habits and even chemical addictions.  There have been are many high-profile public health and safety campaigns, from seat-belt wearing to anti-smoking which used the emotive power of TV to get through to people who would probably have rather not seen it.  It can also recruit families and friends to the cause.

But changing behaviour is also something that commercial brands need us to do.  Ariel’s ‘Turn to 30’ used TV to get us all to turn the dial round and Weetabix inspired us to try a different way of eating it across a week.  With many brands now adding a sustainability message to their advertising, TV is the best way of making people care about ethical and ecological issues.

One media planning technique relevant for behavioural change is frequency and ubiquity.  Topping and tailing within ad breaks, or using consecutive breaks is worth consideration.  This can work particularly well if the first message is the motivational one and the second gives details of where to get help and advice.  Longer form branded content – an advertorial, red button or even and ad-funded programme – is an excellent way of providing both the inspiration and the practical help to make someone change their life for the good, as the Blood Donor service did in a range of AFPs.

Click here to see how the British Heart Foundation campaign persuaded people to give up smoking
Click here to see how the Fire Authority for Northern Ireland effected significant change in habitual behaviour and in turn reduced fatalities and injuries

Television is highly effective at generating a response, either directly to a retail site or by making response advertising in other media more effective.

Direct response

Everyone knows that retailers use TV to maximise the success of any promotion: seasonal sales, product offers, store openings etc. But brands can also use TV's ability to drive people to buy directly on or off-line. Since the '80s TV ads have been carrying phone numbers, and a whole science has developed about how to stimulate phone response efficiently within the capacity of a call centre. Direct financial brands were largely built on TV's ability to generate leads and customer acquisitions.

But with the growth of the internet, brands are also encouraging response to their own websites by including URLs. Viewers also use search engines to find brands they hear about through TV, though clearly it is better for the advertiser to encourage use of URLs. Strong brands made famous through TV are more likely to be found through natural search rather than sponsored links. However there is an art to maximising the search response to TV campaigns. People search not just for brand names but for the strap-lines, songs and actors they have seen on TV. So it's worth making sure your website reflects these elements of the TV ad so you capture all the interest TV has generated. Now more and more online brands are investing heavily in TV. In fact, three of the top fifty TV advertisers are online brands.

A new econometric study, from MediaCom, commissioned by Thinkbox, has measured the impact of television on both immediate web response and other short-term response channels. TV Response: the new rules is the first time that the instant effect TV ads have on web response has been measured and made publically available. Here you can find catch up with the background, methodology and findings of this study, plus some "new rules of response" which we've put together for you. These present some best practice advice on your TV creative and media planning, including how to optimize your creative and other media activity to capture the response that TV generates. All in all, this study reveals that the role of TV in driving response, particularly online, has been massively undervalued.

Interactive TV has brought us an integrated response mechanism within the broadcast environment, with red-button and green button technology. Many brands have found this to be a very successful method of capturing instant interest. See the TA case study here or find out out about Green Button opportunities here.

TV & Online: better together, conducted by Q Media Research, for a joint study between Thinkbox and the IAB examines the effectiveness of using TV and online in tandem. You can find out more about the study here

Driving response through other media

Other media, particularly print, online and DM, offer great response mechanisms. They are often called 'activation media', because the awareness and consideration that TV has created can be activated by them. The danger is that TV's contribution to the response from these other media is mis-attributed. For more on analysing short-term response see Jeremy Griffiths' presentation from our Payback Event by clicking here.

Asthma UK case study
Red button and beyond

"Tell me a fact and I'll learn. Tell me a truth and I'll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever."

Indian Proverb

People lead multi-media lives. At Thinkbox we don't expect TV to be the only medium you use. But we do think that putting TV at the heart of an integrated campaign will make every other medium work better.

Story-telling is the most powerful method of human communication; it's just as true for brands as it is for religion or education. TV campaigns can establish a narrative, perhaps with a cast of characters, which will then resonate when seen in more static media.

TV establishes key elements of the brand - logo, strap-lines, music etc – in a rich media context so that when any individual component is used in another medium it can evoke memories of the fuller TV communication. Using music from TV ads in radio can provoke a visual memory, as long as it's there. Similarly static print and poster campaigns are more impactful and make better sense after being established through moving images. For example, the current Comparethemarket.com campaign has a radio advert featuring Aleksander the Meerkat. If you hadn't seen the TV ad, the radio campaign would have made little sense.

This is why TV makes the ideal lead medium. We don't mean to sound arrogant. We simply mean that TV works well at the start of a campaign. Lead as in chronology, not status.

Programme sponsorship and branded content offer an excellent integration vehicle for brands. Well exploited sponsorship can take the programme associations into all aspects of a brand' marketing; PR, on-pack, in-store, events, staff communications, customer promotions as well as advertising in other media.

Click here to see how T-Mobile bought people closer to the things they love

Click here to see how Bounty focused on moments of escapism

 One of TV’s greatest strength is its ability to demonstrate. The ability to see exactly how the lawnmower cuts, the vacuum cleans, the car seats fold down etc is extremely powerful. Sometimes a viewer needs to see a product in action in order to understand fully its benefits.  It is the power of the moving image accompanied by sound that makes TV advertising so powerful.  Demonstration shows viewers how to consume a new product.  Magners created a fashion for drinking cider over ice through the delicious and thirst-inducing images of clinking ice-cubes. 

Television advertisers have been using demonstration as an aid in their commercials for a long time.  We see two white shirts, one sparkling after being washed in the advertised brand and the other rather less so.  The Cillit Bang ‘penny’ demo told us more powerfully than words ever could that it could do the job.

Click here to see how Round Up used demonstration very effectively to get across the product attributes