A report by TFM Digital reveals a notable shift in brand marketing budgets, with businesses exploring alternatives to Meta and Google due to concerns over brand safety and rising advertising costs, prompting calls for deeper engagement in local area marketing strategies.
A recent report by TFM Digital has highlighted a significant shift in brand marketing budgets, indicating that many businesses are increasingly seeking results beyond the traditional giants of Meta and Google for their Local Area Marketing (LAM) initiatives. This change is largely driven by growing concerns over brand safety and the efficacy of advertising on these platforms.
Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, has faced scrutiny this year following the discontinuation of its third-party fact-checking programme, sparking a wave of users searching for ways to delete their accounts. These developments have underscored ongoing worries about misinformation and its implications for advertisers. Despite projections that Facebook ad revenues will surpass those of linear television by 2025, the TFM Digital report suggests that many marketers are now viewing Meta as having reached a saturation point, resulting in a lack of desired outcomes from advertising campaigns.
The report describes the competitive landscape of digital advertising on platforms like Meta and Google as akin to “digital skipbins,” where local business owners struggle to extract meaningful results. TFM Digital’s analysis points to an overreliance on automation as a contributing factor to this decline in campaign effectiveness. Kelly Healy, General Manager of Advertising Sales for News Corp in Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia, emphasised the need for business owners to engage more deeply with their marketing efforts, stating, “Business owners are not marketers or media planners and buyers. They need guidance to be interrogating these campaigns.”
In the context of rising advertising costs, TFM Digital reported a 14 per cent year-over-year increase in Meta’s cost per ad, with Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) reporting that their cost per thousand impressions (CPM) on Facebook and Instagram has surged approximately 10.31 per cent compared to two years ago. This escalation in costs has prompted brands like Price Attack to reconsider their advertising strategies, as CMO Aimee Madson noted, “We had an experience on one channel, where our costs tripled and our results weren’t there. Times are tough. Retail is tough. So we have looked elsewhere – we can’t afford to waste money on a platform that doesn’t seem consistent anymore.”
The report outlines several strategic recommendations for brands aiming to enhance their LAM efforts, including improving mental availability, tailoring campaigns for specific local impacts, and prioritising personalisation. Anjela Gilbert, a senior marketing specialist at Telstra, elaborated on the importance of targeted local marketing, stating, “Our aim is always to hypertarget local areas to drive traffic into stores. We’re more than happy for them to educate people online, but we know that customers are more likely to purchase in-store. So that’s the job of our LAM.”
Taylor Fielding, CEO of TFM Digital, summarised the essence of the report by noting the need for marketers to adapt their approaches in an increasingly complex digital environment: “Doing more with less is no longer the end to a corporate speech, but a mantra that all must live by. LAM is often placed in the too hard bucket. Indeed, automation and efforts to become more efficient have led to marketing principles of measurement and effectiveness being sidelined for easy to deploy ‘cookiecutter’ personalisation tools.”
With a client roster that includes notable names such as AusBuild, Poolwerx, and Goodstart Early Learning, TFM Digital continues to gain recognition in the industry, recently being listed in the AFR’s Fast100. The insights from this report illustrate a shifting landscape for digital advertising and the critical need for brands to recalibrate their strategies in pursuit of effective local area marketing.
Source: Noah Wire Services
