Each month, The Adquirer provides insight into the creative and media strategies of industry-leading advertisers in a particular sector. Estimated cost per web visit results are provided by our data scientists, utilising sources including Hitwise, Nielsen and BARB.
This month, we look at four different home furnishing advertisers with a similar target audience: indexing highly with females aged 55+, with a suburban lifestyle and who enjoy a bit of Emmerdale. In an industry filled with price promotions and product-heavy creatives, the challenge here is to stand out from the crowd and convince the viewer that your products and service are superior in order to trigger a response. Who tows the line and who breaks the mould? We explore the similarities and differences in their media and creative strategies, and the different calls to action at play.
Bound by the parameters of their hardwood proposition, Oak Furniture Land aims to cut through the noise with another familiar, quirky and humorous ad, featuring their classic duo of the Sales Assistant and Store Manager, with their catchy theme tune playing in the background. As with most furniture retailers, Oak Furniture Land uses this 30-seconds iteration to display the different product ranges that they offer along with a variety of products and their prices.
Showing that as a big spender, you don’t just have to advertise across terrestrial stations at peak time, Oak Furniture Land’s ad budget is spread across plenty of stations and programming and only 51% of impacts are in peak. Terrestrial stations still feature heavily (38% of all impacts), but this is far less than their counterparts in this Adquirer. It could be that their TV media budget of £23m is too big to house on a handful of high impacting stations, or it in fact indicates that there is indeed customer acquisition viability outside of the classic peak terrestrial retail mould.
Throughout the year, a higher proportion of impacts were delivered on Fridays and Saturdays – a similar strategy to that of Furniture Village – with this consistency intimating that they are the most responsive and that little testing deviation is therefore required. Their estimated cost per website visitor of £6.30 indicates that it is proving successful, as that figure trails only Furniture Village in this analysis. However, although the weekend is understandably peak furniture buying time due to the activity of visiting a showroom, access to smart devices allow for immediate browsing at any time, and as such there could be further value achieved throughout the week.
In regards to response-based necessities in the creative, Oak Furniture Land does well to display their website URL throughout the ad. This coincides with the voiceover at the end stating that the sale is on at a store near you, which is also displayed on screen, inviting the audience to search on their website for the nearest store. A big selling point of “FREE Delivery on everything” is potentially lost on the viewer as it only appears on screen in small writing for 3 seconds.
