Yesterday Jobsite issued a press release talking about their TV advertising campaign which is due to kick off early next month…
"Jobsite today announces the launch of a £15 million heavyweight multimedia advertising campaign, which will go live across the UK from 6th October 2008. Spearheaded by a national prime time TV campaign across terrestrial and satellite stations, and supported by radio, print and online, the campaign is the largest ever undertaken by a UK job board, reaching 95% of all UK ABC1 working adults across each of the three planned activity bursts.
The new campaign is the culmination of a two year growth strategy that has seen Jobsite, the UK’s online recruitment pioneer, develop real depth and breadth to its service, creating an unrivalled offering by region and sector. With strong foundations in place, Jobsite believes now is the right time to capitalise and build real mass market awareness with a new nationwide advertising campaign.
Commenting on the launch, Keith Potts, Jobsite CEO says; “The campaign marks an exciting new era for Jobsite. Our success to date can be attributed to building one of the most comprehensive market offerings, providing a full breadth and depth of vacancies, supported by outstanding customer service. The next logical step in our strategy is building mass market awareness and developing a really compelling way to talk about our services, so that people are fully aware of what we have to offer. Our new advertising campaign helps us to achieve this – reaching 95% of all ABC1 working adults at least 13 times within each burst of activity."
When I spoke with Keith and Cheryl (their Senior PR Executive) earlier in the week they told me that it had taken 3 years of research and development to bring this together. They are using award winning director Jeff Stark (who is the creative force behind Virgin’s ads) and the ads feature Max Beesely (from Hotel Babylon) as the central character (and no one can complain he’s not easy on the eye!).
The TV campaign is running in October, January and April in "prime time" viewing slots (think ad breaks in X Factor, Coronation Street, Desperate Housewives and the Champions League). That’s not all though as alongside the TV campaign they are running radio adverts (on Virgin, Capital, Magic, etc) and have a national print campaign (with Jobsite media partners Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Metro and London Lite). Finally, online they will be increasing existing spend by over 50% with paid search, email marketing and display advertising campaigns.
Finally.. to coincide with the campaign, a redesigned Jobsite homepage, featuring the new Jobsite logo, will be going live on the 15th September 2008.
Jobsite are, quite rightly considering the cost, shouting about this. I’m no expert of media spend (sorry!) so thought I’d pick the brains of my "un-named online recruitment source" who is, its safe to say, something of an expert in this area. This is what he had to share:
"from personal experience TV campaigns tend to have a very short term effect. They obviously boost traffic at the time they run but have no long-term gains for the sites they promote (although they might give the CV database a boost – however they are probably active jobseekers).
What this does effect is sales! You can sell to a lot of companies off the back of a pending or current TV campaign. I guess it is easy to justify using a job board who is planning on spending that sort of money than one that isn’t. So Jobsite might pick up some big clients off the back of it. They will also have increased activity from existing ones in anticipation of the campaign.
Interestingly I think they are good for the industry as a whole.
Total jobs have always claimed that whenever Monster ran a campaign their traffic figures went up too. Presumably this is because it nudges active jobseekers who didn’t realise they can search online. They might start at the site they saw advertised but eventually find their way around to the others.
I think it might be a little like Car Insurance…..if you aren’t up for renewal you really don’t care about it. However, when you do come up it becomes very important……therefore the Car Insurance guys have to make sure they advertise the whole 12 months so they are in your face at the right time of the year.
With recruitment we aren’t even guaranteed once a year! So until one of the job boards really do an all year round campaign I don’t think it will work….."
Comments please!
Louise
Let me be clear i have no inside knowledge of the objectives of Jobsite’s marketing push but my opinion is that your un-named recruitment source is a little begrudging in his praise of this big TV ad camapign. The campaign (i presume) is not designed to send someone scurrying off to their PC to type in http://www.jobsite.co.uk – that just wont happen. What TV does brilliantly is brand build to user and client community. As proof i offer you that whenever any piece of research had been done on brand recognition on job boards then Monster and fish4 always came out on top (this may be out of date now but was true up to 2005-6). Way above fish4’s actual position in terms of ad revenue. And guess what they were the only 2 boards to do TV advertising. I worked at Fish for a while and clients could always recall the people in fish suits ad campaign that had run about 3 years previously. Increasing your brand equity helps build long term business success (only helps – does not guarantee delivering it)not just short term gain. Monster is a powerful global online brand and they have spent the marketing dollars to make that so. I would agree on a couple of points though
– it does help all sites gt a spike in traffic
– it massively helps sales too
I think its a further sign that this brilliant high growth industry we work in is growing up!
Cheers
Dom
If anyone fancies a look at what £15,000,000 gets you now days, here it is. http://www.jobsite.co.uk/brandcampaign2009/
It’s good, it’s very good.
gonna have to concur with Mr Sumners with two real life instances, but both of which highlight the power of initial brand profile and recall:
1. friend of a friend is a Software Tester in London. Generally goes from agency contract to contract, but I asked her where she’d look for a job online – Monster & Fish4 came up. No CWjobs, no Jobsite?! But she’s not wrong – she’s just a candidate that doesn’t know any better.
2. clients work similarly to candidates when deciding on media choices – the starting point is what they know, and if they haven’t heard of Jobsite (which, for arguments sake, we’ll say for a particular requirement has the best reach/most appropriate audience) then you’re already uphill battling. I’ve personally (and many times) bowed to a clients decision to go “with who they know” rather than who my advice says should perform best with Jobsite being the loser – more than once coming back and having to re-post against the original recommended site.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m a Jobsite fan – have been since I started working with them due to their professional approach. But their absolute lack of profile has seen them lose out of plenty of campaigns. FACT.
Dom’s right – brand recognition and recall is something you underestimate at your peril (and I find it quite ironic that many people questioning such spend are people who I know to be selling the power of employer branding to their clients – it’s the same thing!).
We all know that job searches online are largely primarily conducted through search engines and can be won or lost on the organic or paid for positioning of the results, but as crowded as that now is then the recalled brand stands out like a beacon. Jobsite can take their unquestionable pedigree and delivery capability and really front up to those brands who have been spending the offline marketing millions for years (whether actual or in kind through their publishing parents).
You need to have the offer working before you drive traffic – Jobsite certainly do have that. And you also need to have a campaign message that resonates with the target audience (I’m not sure that blatantly American people punching the air really resonates with UK job seekers in previous job board adverts we’ve all seen). If you have these two things then I think you may be surprised at the power of a well executed brand message. Your contributor is absolutely spot on in terms of trying to keep front of mind presence and the car insurance analogy, but each brand needs different kind of promotion at different times in their life-cycle. What works for one won’t work for another – and vice versa. For me I think that Jobsite have been pretty cute to date and I have a hunch this will prove to be a smart investment in their brand profile.
I think it’s a great endorsement, and sign of confidence in an ever more sophisticated and maturing industry.
However, I’ve always been of the view that Jobsite never really took full advantage of their solid brand name being synonomous with recruitment websites. In the same way as Google or Hoover define their sectors with their brand, I always believed Jobsite had the scope to do the same.