As audiences increasingly shift their attention online, the traditional power of TV as the dominant advertising medium is waning. In this article, Sujen Selva, Digital Experience Lead (ANZJ) for Mondelez, explores how the brand embraced this challenge, and revamped its media strategy to focus on digital platforms like Meta.
In a marketing landscape that continues to rapidly change, one truth remains clear - brands must go where their audiences are.
Once, that meant investing heavily in TV, which has long been regarded as the cornerstone of media and the gold standard for brand storytelling. But audience habits have changed rapidly over the last few years, and have migrated towards new forms of entertainment, such as short-form video.
It’s a shift which started slowly, but has recently reached a boiling point, making it unignorable now for any brand marketer.
Like many FMCG brands, Mondelez had traditionally regarded television as our go-to channel due to its ability to drive a strong return on investment (ROI) and long-term brand building. TV offered a powerful platform for reaching large audiences quickly and effectively, and for a time, it seemed an irreplaceable part of our media mix.
While digital was still important and growing, we regarded it as a secondary channel. Saying that, we did notice that as devices became more prevalent and people became more online in their everyday lives, the volume of time people spent on platforms like Meta has skyrocketed. With it comes the opportunity for brands to connect with their audiences in more personalised and impactful ways.
It became clear we were at a crossroads. We needed to find a way to deliver the same impact without traditional TV being the mainstay it once was - and that meant moving some of the budget that was dedicated to TV to the platforms where audiences now live and breathe.
As any marketer knows, changing a traditionally successful media mix is a big decision. If we were going to shift spend from TV, we had to do it properly. At that time the prevailing narrative was that you couldn’t build brands on digital channels, and the last thing we wanted was to sacrifice long-term business success by chasing audiences in unsuitable places.
So we opted to proceed with caution, and embarked on a multi-year experiment to find out if our hypothesis was correct, using Meta as our foundation platform.
We quickly realised that we wanted to go beyond just determining whether social media could deliver ROI comparable to TV - we wanted to know how far we could go in using digital to break the misconceptions about this platform’s ability to deliver reach and drive business growth. Ultimately, we wanted to know if digital could begin to fill the increasingly large audience and reach gaps that we were finding from our TV buys.
If you’re going to experiment you need to be prepared for some setbacks - it’s what a test and learn mindset is all about. And our experiment was not without its challenges. When we first ramped up our digital spend to match TV levels, we faced issues with oversaturation, which led to a decline in ROI.
However, rather than view this as a failure and retreat to the tried and tested strategy, we saw it as a learning opportunity. As with any experiment, diving into the data to understand what is really going on is where the true value lies, rather than just taking initial results on face value.
Our project was really about testing Meta’s ability to deliver results at TV-level weights, and in this goal, we succeeded. When we tested again with new optimal thresholds on Meta, making sure we weren’t bombarding audiences with our ads, we delivered 3x ROI and our effectiveness improved.
While television still holds its own in terms of effectiveness per impression, the cost to generate that impression is increasingly prohibitive compared to the audience you can reach. In contrast, Meta’s low cost per impression, combined with its ability to deliver more impressions overall and a wider audience base, means that digital can often provide better value for money.
Finally, by dialling up our digital impressions to match TV scale, we discovered that Meta was not only capable of delivering at TV levels, but it was actually helping to drive our business.
While TV is still a powerful tool, the cost efficiency and scalability of digital make it an increasingly attractive option for brands looking to maximise their ROI.
Given we’ve taken the time to do the work, I wanted to share a few things other brands can learn from our experience.
Firstly, TV is undoubtedly still valuable, particularly when it comes to long-term brand storytelling - but it’s increasingly expensive, and doesn’t have the audience it used to, which means it needs to be utilised in different ways.
Digital is now a more cost-efficient option to balance out the channel stack and deliver short-term ROI, but what we have found beyond doubt is it is also a platform where you can build a brand. That was something it was important for us to test and validate over the long-term.
Secondly, brands need to be where their audiences are. This means investing more in digital platforms that offer the reach, engagement and cost efficiency that TV increasingly cannot. One channel can really no longer do it all, and that challenge will only increase as audience behaviours continue to evolve.
Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes you have to ‘fail’ in order to succeed, and going in with a short-term mindset could see you retreat to the ‘safe’ options before you have really got it right.
The shift from TV to digital is a journey, and there will be bumps along the way. Whilst the people on the other side of the screens are the same, the nuances of the two mediums demand careful consideration and changes to how you plan and buy audiences and the kind of creative you use.
If anything it definitely challenged our team and agency partners to become more creative. But with the right approach and a willingness to learn and adapt, the rewards can be substantial.
At Mondelez, we’ve seen the future of brand building, and it’s digital. As the audience moves online, so too must our media strategies. The days of relying solely on TV are well and truly behind us.
The future is about balance - leveraging the best of both worlds to create a media mix that drives business results and long-term brand equity. And in this new world, digital is no longer the secondary player, it’s the star of the show.
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