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.
The intensity of SCS’s ad voiceover almost makes you jump out of your sofa as you are shown “deal after deal after deal” in a relentless stream of products and prices, grabbing the audience’s attention from the start. Pricing and products remain the key message for the entire ad, with no characters or happy customers making an appearance. The emphasis is on the excitement of all the deals, coupled with the text bubbles on screen such as, “BIG D£AL”. Within 6-seconds of the spot, their logo and website URL appears and stays on screen for the rest of the 30 second spot. Key response-based elements are all in play here, the message is clear.
Not dissimilar to Furniture Village, the creative concentrates on displaying the deals they have on several famous brands highlighted by happy and light-hearted music in the background, on this occasion with Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want”.
However, unlike Furniture Village, which has a more serene feel to the ad, SCS do their best to create a high sense of urgency by not only using words such as ‘hurry’ but also by the tone of the voiceover. This could be why their web visits on mobile versus desktop are 80:20, as viewers are quickly getting their phones out immediately to take advantage of these deals.
SCS stick to their heritage of sofas in this spot, mentioning carpets only briefly and not showing any other product types that they offer, and this lack of variety could be why they achieved a cost per website visit of £7.70, which is far greater than the £4.60 achieved by Furniture Village, despite SCS’s immediate and urgent calls to action.
