The national advertising model is on life support: it's time to pull the plug

A fast food chain called Sonic is known for running national television advertising campaigns, despite the fact that many of the people who see the ads don’t live anywhere near a Sonic location.

It’s not a mistake; Sonic’s chief executive insists that it’s cheaper and more efficient to buy television ads nationally. I have my doubts about that strategy—geo-targeting to the neighborhood-level makes a lot more sense for a brick-and-mortar restaurant—but hey, kudos to Sonic for applying a goofy media strategy to pull off an earned media win. Unfortunately, Sonic isn’t an outlier.

Across industries, marketers cave into the status quo and buy into national media market brand strategies. While an argument can easily be made that national buys are less effective and inefficient, the real problem is that increasingly the national advertising model does little more than prop up an ecosystem of middlemen that ultimately robs consumers and advertisers of value.

Read the full article, written by Semcasting's CEO, Ray Kingman, on The Drum.