While we’re still over a year away from the 2024 presidential elections, brands and advertisers are already starting to consider their plans for the primary season and the general election campaign. The influx of significant political advertising dollars across the marketing mix changes the economics of the marketing during this time, with dollars flowing into the market in a significant way for a short time window. As a result, advertisers must shift their budgets and reconsider their marketing mix so that they can still maximize their ad spending despite rising prices. Marketers must be willing to pivot, potentially using very different channels to achieve the same impact with static budgets.
So, how can they determine the most effective marketing mix?
They should optimize their mix to account for all marketing tactics, and environmental factors, like the election, in a model. For instance, the Keen model can optimize each dollar based on where the marketer will get the best return (i.e., the highest marginal ROI) based on the response curve. With prices for ad buys expected to rise during the election session, this will be a key component of the recommendation.
While pricing might go up during election season, it’s important that marketers maintain some form of advertising. Pulling back on marketing completely for any length of time is a mistake because of marketing’s long-term effects. Marketing builds value over time, so if you are not adding new investment, your past marketing efforts will decay over time at different rates. It is okay to pull back when there are adverse marketing conditions or business challenges. As an example, if a brand would lose a lot of distribution at shelf, a marketer would likely want to pull back some. Otherwise, they would be driving consumers inefficiently to empty shelves.
Pulling back because of a slight price increase is not a good enough reason to stop advertising completely. Rather, it’s about allocating resources to different channels. The most profitable way to reach consumers will be different during campaign seasons, so it’s important that brands use models that help them identify the right media mix to keep things on track.
Want to learn more about how Keen can help you achieve your optimum marketing mix? Take a tour of the Keen Platform today to see how we can empower your decision-making process by asking and answering the critical question: “What should I do next?”.
