Media Buying

10.31 Brianna - Halloween Spending

Halloween Spending

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By: Brianna Wilkinson

The most wonderful time of the year… not Christmas, but Halloween. I love Halloween, I mean I LOVE it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the headline:

2019: Halloween spending to reach $8.8 billion

According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics., consumers plan to spend $3.2 billion on costumes (purchased by 67 percent of Halloween shoppers), $2.6 billion on candy (95 percent), $2.7 billion on decorations (72 percent) and $390 million on greeting cards (34 percent).

Back when I was a kid, we would get the latest costume with the plastic mask with breathing holes and plastic outfit to go over your clothes.  Living in the Midwest you were ecstatic when you didn’t have to wear a coat to cover it:

Eat, drink and be scary 

Long gone are the days when Halloween was just for kids. In fact, 18- to 24-year-old consumers are the most likely to celebrate Halloween, with nearly nine in ten planning to do so this year, up from 84 percent a decade ago.  

How these younger consumers are celebrating has shifted as well. While fewer plan to host or attend parties, more are handing out candy, decorating and dressing in costumes. They’re significantly more likely to dress up than their older counterparts and will spend roughly $36 this year on costumes.  

The other big money spend is costumes for your pets:

Dressing up pets might seem absurd to some, but it’s grown in popularity over the years and is becoming big business. In a 2010 NRF survey, 12 percent of the people asked had planned to dress up their pets; today, it’s nearly two in ten (17 percent). Likewise, spending on pet costumes continues to increase: This year’s total planned spending for pet costumes comes in at $490 million, more than double than in 2010. Curious what these cute animals will be dressed as? Top pet costumes this year include pumpkins, hot dogs and superheroes — because every pet is a superhero in their owner’s heart.

Give ‘em pumpkin to talk about

We all know showing up with the best costume will guarantee everyone chats about your supreme creativity. But how will you find the best idea? In this digital age, social media provides endless inspiration, and the number of people relying on these platforms for costume ideas has grown significantly over the years. From YouTube to Pinterest, more and more Halloween celebrants continue to use social media to find the ideal costume.

So in this day and age, go to your favorite social media platform and show your Halloween spirit or be jealous at the creative ideas of your “friends”- just get on board and have fun. That is the point of the season, no matter how much money we all spend!!!

10.24 Patt - Why Hire Media Agency

The Time to Hire a Media Buying Agency is Now

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By Patti Harrison

The change in how we consume media has literally provided us marketers with endless opportunities to reach consumers, making the role of media planners and buyers central to shaping a brand.  Choosing which communication methods to use should be pivotal in driving strategy as we move forward in our consumer centric universe.

With all the complexities of media selection, the relevancy of using an agency that specializes in placing media has never been greater. It takes a dedicated team that is managing media full time to stay up to speed on its rapid paced evolution.  It takes platform agnostic team that can provide the necessary checks and balances.

National Media Consultant, David Angell trinityp3.com sums up the necessary qualities to look for when securing a Media Buying Agency.

  1. Consultative. You want an agency of thought-leaders, educators, confidants and sounding boards, people who have the right balance of a focus on the reality of now and a focus on future possibilities.
  2. Compliant. You want an agency with a clear structure, and which demonstrates clarity and flexibility in its dealings with you, an agency that’s willing to stand up and be counted on their own performance and their contribution to yours. You also want an agency that’s prepared to help drive best practice in the industry to which they belong.
  3. Commercial. You want an agency that can handle itself, that trades with the right balance of confidence, assertive power and knowledge. You want an agency that can get the job done when the rubber hits the road. You want an agency that is not the cheapest but is the best you can buy into – and which buys into you.
  4. Collaborative. You want an agency that’s adaptable enough to thread itself through your organization across all touch points, and those of your other agency suppliers, with the appropriate amount of grace, care and conviction.

#winningteam, #mediabuying, #harrisonmedia, #adagency

Summer Vacay! (1)

What did you do for summer vacation?

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I can’t believe it is almost back to school time again, summer just flew by! Pretty soon the networks will roll out their fall launch and be back into the full swing of “must see tv” and all the live sports they can manage. The network’s sales teams are salivating to get back to normal. It’s like bringing back the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Summer is over and once again summer tv viewing gets a bad rep for its reruns and what is generally called fluff programming. Ad Age (8/15/19) reported:

With six weeks to go before the 2019-20 season gets underway, the median age of the broadcast primetime audience is 58.7 years old, TV usage among adults 18-24 is down 17 percent and the Big 4 networks are averaging a 0.5 C3 rating in the 18-49 demo. In July, fewer than 795,000 members of the dollar demo watched the commercials on NBC each night, and the Peacock was the highest-rated network during the month! Currency deliveries were down 19 percent last month, which means that the promos for this fall’s new and returning series reached one-fifth as many demographically desirable viewers as they did in the same period one year ago.

Broadcast TV’s 10 Oldest-Skewing Summer Series

Drama

Game Show 

Competition

 

Broadcast TV’s 10 Youngest-Skewing Summer Series

Drama

Game Show

Competition

Misc/Other

Source: Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, May 13-August 14, 2019.
Chart by Corey Holmes.

 

 

Adding to the viewership burden, CBS and Direct TV and their subsidiaries had a three-week dispute locking out 401,409 A 18+ in the Detroit DMA which is about 12% of viewers. CBS gets knocked as the old people network but what marketers tend to forget (as we lust after the proverbially millennial) is that Boomers hold 70% of the wealth in the United States and account for 42% of all consumer spending. So, we should be embracing the fact that we have new programming in the summer that people tune into and stop writing it off as three months of fluff plus the Summer Olympics every 2 years. We should embrace the consumer spender that tunes into to these programs week after week instead of shutting them out and targeting the attention span that is only :06 long.