随着社交媒体和零售媒体的重要性日益凸显，广告商如何在针对漏斗底部转化进行优化的数字渠道与针对漏斗顶部建立品牌资产和知名度的传统渠道（如电视和广播）之间战略性地分配资源？
It’s been a favorite question among marketing pundits, and the consensus today is that advertisers need brand building and performance marketing to work in unison to make the most of every touchpoint and engage their target audiences at every step of the consumer journey. Long-term success, after all, is built one transaction at a time. But what’s the right channel mix to get the job done?
事实证明，公司如何在传统渠道和数字渠道之间分配媒体资金与其媒体预算规模有很大关系。在本博客中，我们将通过回顾一些新的汽车和零售业见解来说明这种关系，但首先，我们要消除一些误解。
媒体策划没有捷径可走
We often associate traditional channels like TV with brand building, and digital channels like social media with performance marketing, but it’s a terrible shortcut. TV commercials can be very effective closers, especially when they’re timed with special events or holidays, and display or video ads on social and retail media can be very effective at building a brand’s familiarity, sentiment or relevance. It’s high time for the advertising industry to start thinking of all channels more holistically—or as P&G alum Jim Stengel and others put it in a recent HBR paper, make brand building more ‘performance-accountable,’ and performance marketing more ‘brand-accountable.’
The second widespread misconception is that digital channels are easier to measure. This deserves a bigger conversation because it ultimately depends on what advertisers are trying to achieve with their campaigns, but measurement solutions for traditional channels have come a long way in recent years. More importantly, with the release of cross-media solutions like our own Nielsen ONE platform, cross-media measurement isn’t a distant dream anymore, and advertisers can now get a deduplicated view of audience engagement across all the channels in their media plan.
Finally, many advertisers today believe that digital channels are more effective than traditional channels. We debunked that myth in our 2024 年度营销报告 and showed that there was a wide gap between perceived performance and actual performance, especially when we consider full-funnel effectiveness. We demonstrated that cross-media strategies could yield a 5X improvement in on-target reach (from 17% for campaigns concentrated on a single media type to 90% for well-balanced campaigns), but too many advertisers remain set in their ways—out of habit, lack of experience, or out of fear of spreading their budgets too thin.
行业基准可以提供帮助吗？让我们来看看零售业和汽车业这两个关键行业的广告主如今是如何根据他们可支配的预算来分配媒体资金的。
预算规模影响预算分配
We used 尼尔森Ad Intel data from more than 100,000 retail and auto brands to understand how much each of them spent on advertising in the U.S. during the 12 months ending in November 2024, and we grouped them by the size of their media budget. Figure 1 shows what share retail brands allocated to traditional and digital channels during that time compared to that of automotive brands.
去年花费超过 1 亿美元的零售商在电视和广播等传统渠道上投入了 46% 的预算。当然，这只是一个平均值--一些顶级广告商如 Lowe's 和梅西百货（Macy's）的投入要高得多，而亚马逊（Amazon）或申银万国（Shein）等其他广告商的投入则要低得多--但这表明，拥有巨额预算的零售品牌仍然依赖传统渠道来讲述自己的故事，并大规模地接触目标客户。汽车公司的情况更为明显，顶级汽车制造商（如丰田、通用或现代）将 70% 的媒体预算用于传统渠道。
在另一端，预算较少的广告主（如本地独立零售商和汽车经销商）更倾向于使用价格较低的本地电视和广播广告，而不是全国性广告，但他们往往会像顶级品牌一样分配预算：零售商中 45-55% 的预算用于传统渠道，汽车品牌中 60-70% 的预算用于传统渠道--除非他们的规模真的很小，没有太多的传统渠道可供选择。
在这两个行业中，最引人注目的是中等规模的广告商--如吉他中心（Guitar Center）和后市场（Back Market）这样的零售商，或北极星（Polaris）和普利司通（Bridgestone）这样的汽车品牌--每年的广告支出在 500 万到 5000 万美元之间。这些公司在数字渠道上的媒体预算份额远远高于预算更多或更少的同行。这可能是出于完全合理的战略原因，但也有可能是过去一些预算在这一范围内的广告主认为广告购买流程过于复杂，从而放弃了电视。但在不久的将来，通过联网电视（CTV）实现的低成本程序化选择可能会让更多中小型企业（SMB）接触到电视广告。
为进一步了解情况，图 2 提供了各预算范围传统渠道的细分。我们可以看到，对于顶级广告主来说，传统渠道主要是指电视（尤其是汽车品牌），但对于中型企业来说，广播无疑是渠道组合中的重要组成部分，对于小型企业来说，户外广告也是如此。印刷品也仍然是中型零售商的重要渠道。
了解同行的做法
我们能从这些分析中得到什么启示？
- First off, there’s really no such thing as an optimal channel mix for every brand in every situation. Media planners need to do their homework and determine what channels work best for them.
- With robust cross-media measurement solutions now available, advertisers can spread their media budgets across a variety of channels with confidence to cast a wide net and take advantage of crucial cross-media synergies.
- Traditional media remains highly relevant. These channels remain a very big part of the media mix for companies of all sizes, and may start playing an even bigger role for SMBs now that the TV ecosystem is more addressable and ad buying is becoming more accessible.
- Competitive advertising intelligence is key. In today’s dynamic marketplace, brands that understand what their peers are doing with their media dollars—companies in the same industry, operating in the same markets, with the same media budget, and targeting similar consumers—will be much better equipped to compete.
For help making the most of your marketing budget, download Nielsen’s report exploring three key media convergence trends, talk to a Nielsen representative or visit the 尼尔森市场 to discover trend reports and granular datasets you need to get started.
