Digital vs. Traditional Media in Trinidad!

There’s a change occurring within the media industry! The comparisons of the media dollar between Digital and Traditional media has been a buzz for quite some time! Everyone always says “Digital is more bang for your buck” or “Radio is the best way to reach people in T&T” or how about the general opinion that if it’s not in the Express or Guardian it is not considered to be in the public conversational domain? Some of these statements are based on facts and some based purely on opinions and experiences within the local Trinidad & Tobago Advertising Industry.

Well! With all these speculations and assumptions we set out to do some basic research and measurements to break it down for you in a very simple way.

As we begin we must look to our more mature markets for the beginning trends and transformations being experienced across the traditional media landscape. For instance according to the Newspaper Association of America it states:

Digital advertising rose to $3.4bn and accounted for 19% of advertising revenue

Revenue from Digital channels increased 5.8% year-on-year (YoY). Digital advertising, subscriptions, agency style services and others accounted for 12% of total industry revenue.

But that’s not all…

In 2012 Google’s revenue was larger than that of the entire American Newspaper Industry and…

In November of this year this will surpass that of the entire global Newspaper industry.

With that in mind let’s explore the local market for a bit. Many of you may be familiar with the infamous Market, Facts and Opinion Survey. This survey helps to guide many business and strategic media buying decisions within Trinidad and Tobago as it provides critical data and analysis on what’s happening with traditional media.

In 2013, the MFO conducted a national survey of the media industry which revealed that out of 643 households, 425 homes have internet access. That’s an average of 66% of all households surveyed. 650K+ users! Isn’t that something? Don’t believe it?

You can surely be convinced to know that Facebook alone has 580,000 Accounts that claim to be of Trinbagonian affiliation.

So what does that mean for marketers and campaign planning? Well for starters it means one can reach people in easier and in more targeted ways. Yes we know, everyone has told you this is possible using the Internet but has anyone really explained how and why? Listen up!

Swing back to the MFO. Have a look at these graphs from these statistical offices.

In short what this is saying is that on any given day in T&T we can run a media campaign that can reach, on average, 1 Million people. If we are lucky of course…very lucky. Of course anyone outside of media and advertising would ask how much will this cost? 

So let us break it down for you:

To reach all traditional media in T&T all day for one whole day, thus touching this entire claimed audience of 1 Million people will cost an approximately $30,000 – $60,000 TTD a day with a media plan including:
3 Press Ads in the 3 larger news papers
1 Prime Time TV Commercial circulated on the Local TV Stations
1 Radio Ad place on Every Station and run all day.

Now let us compare this to Digital Marketing via Facebook Advertising.

We can start with a pretty simple test! We ran some ads for a client earlier this year. One of those last minute jobs, client calls up, wants to activate and of course we would never say no to a client! Unless of course were talking terrible typography…or white text on a yellow background! But this was simple. Get people to share a little love for Mother’s day. The Ad looked a bit like this….

Now, the first major difference we are talking about is performance based media, in that, the more you spend, the more you get! Seems fair right? It is…

Everyone with any budget and the know how can build campaigns that exceed the impact of old media. Don’t believe us?

Well let’s compare directly to our 1 Million Ad Impressions that traditional will give you! For what did we say 60k TTD?

Reaching 1 Million Impressions on Facebook, with some clever targeting and a decent brand message…can be achieved in….drumroll!

$1,200 TTD! Yep. Only 2 zero’s there. You’re seeing right.

What’s even better is that these Ads have the ability to capture user emails, age and gender (your future marketing initiatives will thank you for this).

We’re not done yet though, we’ve got more! Imagine a world where you can target people who have particular interests, “Like” other brands or have checked into a specific location. If your ‘Facebook Marketing Guru’ is not bringing this to the table, he/she should be.