‘Linear TV builds long-term memory structures for brands’

The role of linear TV has accelerated the growth trajectory for new D2C brands at a massive scale in the recent past. TV has played a major role in not only building brand recall but also multiplying leads and sales.

At exchange4media’s D2C Revolution Summit 2023, Amrutha Nair, Head - Entertainment Ad Sales and Strategy, Disney Star, moderated a panel discussion to discuss what TV brings to the table for D2C brands.

On the panel were Chirag Gupta, Founder, 4700BC; Jatan Bawa, Co-founder, Perfora; Ravi Kabra, Co-founder, Skippi Ice Pops; Gaurav Mehta, Chief Marketing Officer, Noise; Mithun Mukherjee, Executive Creative Director, FCB Kinnect, and Aditi Mishra, Chief Executive Officer, Lodestar UM.

D2C brands, in this digital era, are following a journey, starting with performance marketing on digital platforms in particular, before they plunge into television.  

In Mehta’s experience of more than a decade, he has heard that investing in short-term ROI is better than investing in something as huge as TV for a beginner brand. 

“Well, all of this is quite true but sometimes it all depends on what the product life stage is and where the business stands. At OLX, our first TV ad was in 2013, right when I joined, but at CarDekho we took that plunge two and a half years later,” he shared.

Skippi runs on the idea that people don’t buy a product, they buy a brand. So, the product doesn’t matter much, the brand building does.

Kabra recalled that Skippi wasn’t early on in its journey, but rather late to feature on a regional television channel. The brand wasn’t so big enough to go on a national television channel then because that was a huge investment for a product that was launched in a branded category just two years back. 

That is how regional language becomes like geo-targeting for linear TV business. Hence, any brand that wants to start small on TV can bank upon regional channels with an affluent audience.

Bawa of Perfora shared his brand is ever-evolving as it's just a two-year-old brand. In his opinion, when a brand decides to advertise on linear TV, it has to take care of the prerequisites of a mix of factors, including a 360-degree approach, a sustainable plan and awareness about the brand. 

As for Aditi Mishra, “TV does not do wonders for a brand in a single day. It shows the ROI in weeks, months and years after a campaign has been launched.

Linear TV’s ‘big screen’ advantage builds long-term memory structures for brands, which is far more important for new brands.”

The content on linear TV is also fully brand safe, so, how does brand safety work for new and emerging businesses?

Mukherjee explained there have been multiple cases where brands took one wrong step on the internet and lost their brand equity overnight. Hence, brands play very safe when it comes to television. 

This is why brands, be it raw or ripe, opt for professionally generated content for linear TV. Nothing engages audiences more than professionally generated original content across linear TV and OTT, day after day.

According to 4700BC’s Gupta, when a brand comes to the stage of reaching out to audiences via TV, they need popular faces who have a sense of connection with the viewers. Content is equally important no doubt but face has a bigger value at the initial stages. 

Nair stated 88 per cent of India watches TV with someone, and hence, the viewing experience is shared. D2C brands need to leverage wider collective audiences in order to multiply their reach. 

“When you want to build a brand nobody knows about, then television offers the single-largest opportunity and a known face definitely catches attention. This is much more difficult to do on digital platforms due to the amount of content every viewer is exposed to on a daily basis,” concluded Mishra.