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Holiday ads moving online — away from TV

By Drew Harwell, The Washington Post
Published: November 22, 2015, 5:46am

Shortly before Hallmark would have traditionally launched its seasonal commercial heart-warmers, the greeting-card giant made a surprising confession: This year, for the first time ever, it would spend nothing on holiday TV ads.

Instead, the struggling keepsakery will go all-digital, spending on cheeky YouTube ads and partnering with bloggers to sing the brand’s praises. It is also paying the photo-sharing app Snapchat to plaster Hallmark’s logo onto family pictures taken beneath America’s big downtown Christmas trees.

Hallmark’s decision to forgo its decades of feel-good marketing was seen by many as another blow against TV. Where television ads are pricey and imprecise in their reach, a growing number of companies say, digital marketing is a cheap laser beam.

But in the holiday selling season, can the Web truly replace old-fashioned tear-jerker TV?

“When’s the last time a banner ad made you cry?” said Brian Wieser, a media analyst for Pivotal Research Group. “If you’re a greeting-card company, it sure better.”

Google and other kings of digital ad space have argued that one of TV’s biggest selling points, its vast and undiscriminating sway, is also its fatal weakness. Spending on search, smartphone, online-video and social-media marketing campaigns has exploded and is expected to overtake TV ad spending next year, data from media researcher Magna Global show.

Companies such as travel-planning site TripAdvisor, which spent $20 million on TV ads in the third quarter of the year, have said they will pause TV ads next year and spend some or all of the ad money elsewhere, hoping to save cash on expensive broadcast ads and follow a shift in customers’ attentions.

Between 2008 and 2015, the typical American’s share of daily media time spent in front of a TV tumbled from 44 percent to 36 percent, while the share spent with a smartphone grew from 3 percent to 24 percent, Nielsen data show.

Katherine Cartwright, a Hallmark spokeswoman, said the company’s shift to digital ads lets it focus on its target market of “millennial moms” in a finer way than a national TV campaign could allow, and with the hopes to go viral. For the campaign, the company has partnered with Angie Keiser, a Cincinatti blogger who makes dresses out of paper.

The company is riffing off its reputation of advertising “Hallmark moments” with comedic Web ads — in one, a perfectionist micromanages her kids’ Christmas-tree decorations — set to air on streaming services such as Hulu, hoping to reach, Cartwright said, the “mom watching ‘Scandal’ in bed on her phone after the kids fall asleep.”

Hallmark’s turn toward irreverence marks a curious change of tone for a gift shop known more for sappy inspirationals. One ad last year featured a kindly trash man saving a mother’s cherished Christmas ornament, and it ended with them sharing a hug.

The holiday draw of social media also poses a growing threat to traditional television: Snapchat said this month that its daily video views have tripled since May, to 6 billion views a day. Jefferies analyst Brian Pitz wrote in a recent note to investors that Facebook, with its 8 billion daily views, also “looks well positioned to capture” an increasing portion of TV commercial cash.

But for companies with budgets big enough to handle a wide-scale ad blitz, TV is still the star attraction. Last year, Wieser said, Apple spent 80 percent of its $800 million U.S. ad budget on TV commercials — including one sappy holiday spot in which a girl gifts her grandmother an emotional memory with the help of an iPad Mini. And over the last week, Wal-Mart has spent about $13 million on more than 3,600 airings of an ad featuring a dad working hard to order his son a Yoda doll.

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