I noticed an interesting post over on the Advertising 2.0 blog today (I believe by the way that we have a mutual friend in Vincent Thome who has mumbled something about combined bloggy drinks?) commenting on a BrandRepublic article about an IAB survey which states that 72% of purchasers of luxury goods did so as a result of seeing an Internet ad, whilst only 70% named magazines and 62% television.
I’m both surprised and not surprised by this.
My own strangely offline gutt instinct is to assume that magazines rule the roost in terms of recall for luxury goods purchasers (classed by the IAB as individuals with an income of £40k+). The sheer number of magazine titles which contain nearly nothing but full page and double page ads for the sector is astronomical - lifestyle and beauty titles for both men and women are filled with them. I have no problem with TV being last - the fact that luxury goods really aren’t the domain of most prime time viewing ad slots tells me it’s not going to be the top of pile. But Internet beating mags is a surprise to me I must admit.
But, I am also unsurprised by it, and this is perhaps because I cut my digital teeth on luxury goods and I have a lot of fond memories for them and indeed I think I harbour a probably not so secret desire to return to that side of things in some way or other in the future. Luxury goods, and the style of photography and creative often used in advertising them, works particularly well IMHO when translated from print to digital. I’ve done handbags, watches, cosmetics, cars and travel, all in the luxury sectors, and all of them worked well in a kind of brand awareness ATL glossy static late 1990’s kind of way.
I remember very clearly from the spring of 2001, post dot-com bubble, discussing some sites I’d worked on with the MD of now very successful web startup that the creative I was showing him looked like magazine ads, and I had to really persuade him I wasn’t trying to pull a fast one by just showing him a DPS. I believe his phrase was along the lines of "I didn’t know websites could look that good" which was a phrase I loved relaying back to the creative director who did them!
The article goes on to say that according to the IAB luxury consumers spend more time online than they do with any other media, spending a lot of it during the research phase before they go and execute their actual purchase in the real world - where’s that changing funnel-to-tumbler research Yahoo!?
I really think that luxury goods helped to pave the way for the massive uptake over the years in Internet advertising, certainly being one of those product sectors along with cars and travel (of which some also fall in the luxury category of course) which really translated naturally into the online space and helped to make digital marketing & advertising the industry it is today.
I’d love to see a similar report on all product categories to see what the percentages associated with recall are across the board but some how I suspect it might not match the scale of the luxury sector, certainly not right now.
Howard