Have Burberry built a ‘cathedral in the desert’?

At the IPA’s Effectiveness Week conference on the 2nd November, keynote speaker and industry luminary Les Binet likened campaigns that don’t include paid media support to the notion of building cathedrals in the dessert. The assertion being that you can create the most wonderful, beautiful content, but without paid media support, no one will ever find it.

This analogy came to mind when Burberry announced that their Christmas TV ad, filmed at a reported cost of £10 million, would not air on television. The campaign does not rely entirely on owned and earned assets – there is paid support through digital, out of home, print, PPC and social – but the lack of TV support feels like a big move for a brand investing an eight figure sum in audio-visual creative.

While it’s too early to know who will win the battle of the Christmas retailers, the early data is mixed for Burberry. On the one hand, the seven days following the launch of their campaign saw Burberry’s take a 0.45% share of all visits to UK fashion sites – up from 0.1% in previous weeks (Hitwise data). Much of this uplift came via the Independent, who featured the ad in their online News, Business and Culture sections. However, when looking at the broader search interest in a selection of the major Christmas campaigns, Burberry do not receive the same upturn in interest:

If we look more specifically at Burberry and House of Fraser, we see a ‘double bounce’ for House of Fraser – an uplift in traffic on the release of their ad on YouTube, followed by a further spike on the day of the TV launch (starting with a 40” spot in I’m A Celebrity on ITV1). While it’s true that Burberry is winning the YouTube video count (almost 6 million at the time of writing versus 400k for House of Fraser), the House of Fraser launch spot alone was seen by around 10.2m individuals (according to live BARB data).

Ultimately, the success of each retailer’s Christmas campaigns will rightly be judged by a combination of sales, return on investment and longer term brand metrics. On a snap analysis however, Burberry look to have much to do to match the TV-led boost seen by their competitors.

Mentions of retailer brands over time:

Mentions of retailer brands over time (inc Burberry):

 

By James Humphrey, Jess Vasey and Dan McNicholas