Throwing all of its eggs in one basket, Mike’s Hard Lemonade has dedicated ALL of its advertising budget to the digital arena. In the highly competitive market of malt-beverage advertising, focused spending of advertising dollars is a smart move. But what do they stand to lose by abandoning TV?
The digital advertising environment provides a wealth of opportunities for exposure, but our experience suggests that digital still struggles to carry the weight of an entire campaign – particularly one that relies on generating new customers. As more of a ‘lean forward’ medium than TV, digital excels at generating involvement among brand fans, but tends to be less successful in achieving what Mike’s needs to accomplish.
We’ve found digital advertising to be most successful when creatively integrated with a broad-based offline campaign. Digital campaigns that use broader-based exposure platforms to drive consumers to social media and other earned brand exposures can also be highly impactful, but earned media exposures rarely accomplish the type of broad-based effects that Mike’s needs in order to meet its sales goals.
Digital campaigns that are highly cohesive, using a very consistent brand voice and story across the disparate digital platforms, also have a higher likelihood of success. Given the use of multiple agencies on a project basis, Mike’s has set up a substantial challenge in trying to pull off a high degree of cohesion.
Mike’s is also embarking on several new products and line extensions this year, but we’ll save that discussion for another day…
