4 Reasons Food Advertisers Must Invest in TV Brand Building — Yup, Even Smaller CPG Brands

The performance plateau for CPG brands is real. If you think a performance-based mix of online search, social, and display ads covers all your marketing needs, you may be on the edge of a major sales drop. Once saturation kicks in, you’re left with a closed loop of existing customers, depriving your brand of fresh prospects and top-funnel awareness.

To reignite growth, you must diversify your marketing mix with channels that build brand awareness and replenish your prospect pool.

How Streaming TV Breathes New Life into CPG Marketing

No, we’re not talking about the Ovaltine ads on your grandma’s rabbit-eared television set. Streaming, OTT, and CTV ads have transformed how CPG brands reach customers. Unlike an ad spot during I Love Lucy, their precise targeting capabilities ensure buy cycles remain dynamic and your brand stays top-of-mind.

Here are four of the best reasons your CPG brand needs to start giving some serious consideration to TV brand building.

1. TV Provides Return on Investment Unlike Any Other Media

Television reaches consumers when they are in a “lean back” environment, which is critical for making an impression. When your audience is relaxing in front of a screen, they’re more open to new information and products. In other words, they’re in the ideal condition to enter the awareness stage of your buy cycle.

Best of all, streaming TV, OTT, and CTV empower you with the scale to reach broad audiences and simultaneously retarget viewers throughout their purchase journey.  You can measure brand awareness through brand lift studies and link retargeting ads to desired outcomes like grocery store purchases, for instance.

In fact, The Advertising Research Foundation’s “How Advertising Works” project found that a combination of well-targeted TV and digital platform campaigns returned an average 60% gain in ROI. That means you can prove your marketing team’s effectiveness throughout an entire TV campaign.

2. TV Advertising Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank

If you’re a smaller CPG brand, you may envy your competition’s robust mix of upper and lower-funnel media and assume there’s no way your company could ever keep up. But it’s a myth that you can’t find broadcast-quality creative that’s within budget. 

Take our client, Chicken Cock Whiskey. EHY’s creative team produced this low-cost TV ad that perfectly encapsulated the brand’s irreverence and bawdy sense of humor. It’s short, simple, and says everything it needs to say to grab your attention and build brand awareness.

3. TV Has Unparallelled Target Audience Precision

There is almost no limit to the level of targeting and selectivity of CTV and OTT advertising. Beyond demographics, you can capture people who purchase specific products or shoppers who frequent specific stores. Being able to measure not only specific populations but also their intent and engagement is invaluable for brands striving to beat the performance plateau. Especially if your market is niche, you can make the most of your ad spend with these measuring capabilities. 

Take mom-and-pop restaurant operators, for example. Since they’re not quick service restaurants like Chipotle or Sonic, you might not think a TV ad campaign would be worth the spend. However, it’s easy to precisely target and reach these local businesses with streaming ads. You can unlock an entirely new customer base, counterbalancing your existing sales channels with a new stream of prospects.

It’s easier to automate not just who but when you target your audience with streaming capabilities, too. If you know your product’s life cycle is four weeks, for instance, you can retarget customers four weeks after they first purchase it utilizing first-party purchase data from retailers or data providers like Circana or Catalina.

As you can imagine, the targeting precision that streaming TV capabilities offer will only make your ad spend more efficient. And because your TV ads can live in multiple places, such as your website and social feeds, you can get even more bang for your buck.

4. It’s Easy to Optimize Your TV Ad Spend

Because the level of targeting and the selectivity of media placement is so sophisticated, television is one of the most efficient and cost-effective marketing tools you have at your disposal. By incorporating return on ad spend and brand lift metrics, you can calibrate your campaigns to maximize sales impact relative to your investment, ensuring every dollar works smarter and harder.

At EHY, we have the strategic and creative expertise to help you launch broadcast-quality TV ads and maintain a steady flow of new and loyal customers. Want to take your marketing mix to the next level? Reach out.