• by Wayne Friedman , June 13, 2016

As the digital media market matures, some marketers have gone back to traditional media as part of their media mix. 

Jack Jackson, associate integrated media director of Zimmerman Advertising, speaking at the MediaPost TV Insider Summit last week, said that in general, automotive marketers a few years ago had 10% of budgets in digital, when then rose to 50%. Now he says it is headed back to traditional TV.

“It is shifting back, wanting to go back to broadcast -- wanting to go back to localized cable, or radio, if they have to,” he says.

In addition, Jackson says client AutoNation, in trying to compete with the likes of Autotrader and others, is “pulling their third-party spend, and putting it into first party, shifting it around, pushing the brand itself, pushing the dot.com.”

Lilian Ligor, senior manager of global broadcast marketing of Vistaprint of Vista Print, says: “We are even doing catalogs again. Our media mix is very broad.” But Ligor says there are more changes coming: “We need to do more video,” she says -- which might include programmatic and addressable TV.

“Sometimes we go after the shiny new object,” says Fariba Zamaniyan, senior vp of audience insight, TiVo Research. Zamaniyan says TiVo has done studies showing marketers suffering by putting too much money into digital media; then showing improvement once dollars are returned to traditional TV, which could include the likes of programmatic TV deals.