Fuel prices are rising, consumer spend is dropping: Here’s why effective marketing matters more than ever
7 min read
In the marketing world, it’s a tale as old as time: Economic shock hits. Costs rise. Consumers spend less. Businesses come under pressure. And almost inevitably, marketing budgets are the first to be cut.
But while it may be tough to stomach at the time as you watch your margins drop, history shows that disappearing from the market during periods of uncertainty is often the bigger risk. Brands that remained bold in their communication – like Checkers Sixty60 during COVID-19, Capitec during the 2008 financial crisis, and Nando’s during loadshedding – prove that continued aggressive investment in visibility while competitors pulled back pays off.
In short, the brands most visible during volatile periods are usually the ones that come out the other side with the stronger market share.
Therefore, the question is not whether businesses should market during difficult periods, but rather, how to market more effectively when budgets come under pressure.
Right now, many South African businesses are entering exactly this kind of cycle. Fuel price increases – spurred by the Middle East conflict – are rippling across the economy, increasing transport costs, operational expenditure and ultimately the cost of goods themselves. Consumers are feeling the squeeze, which means advertisers are feeling it, too. When disposable income shrinks, spending slows and pressure builds for businesses, both large and small.
We’re already starting to see the early signs of this across the advertising industry. Brands and agencies are becoming more cautious with spend, with budgets being delayed, reduced or reassessed altogether. And I suspect we’ll see this ramp up even further in the second half of the year, as the full impact of rising fuel costs moves through the supply chain.
But difficult trading conditions also tend to force something else: creativity.
In stable times, marketing conversations are often dominated by scale – How do we get the most reach? How do we extend our message far and wide? – but periods of economic pressure force marketers to think more creatively and strategically about how to make the budget they do have work harder for them.
That shift is one of the reasons we’re seeing growing interest in more tactical, flexible and performance-led media buying models, particularly within the programmatic digital out of home (pDOOH) arena.
Historically, outdoor advertising was often perceived as rigid, expensive and inaccessible, unless you had big budget behind you. But the digitisation of the out-of-home landscape has fundamentally changed that model.
Today, advertisers can activate campaigns far more tactically: Instead of owning a billboard 24/7, brands can purchase smaller windows of time during specific parts of the day, in specific environments, for specific audiences. Campaigns can be adjusted dynamically, spend can be scaled up or down quickly, and messaging can change by location, time of day or audience behaviour.
This has given outdoor media the flexibility and precision traditionally associated with digital channels, yet with the scale and real-life presence of a medium proven to better attract and retain consumer attention.
At a time when consumers are increasingly blind to digital clutter, research from Kantar Media Reactions has found that DOOH significantly outperforms online advertising on brand recall, delivering recall scores of up to 84%, versus as low as 9% for some online channels.
Moreover, according to a Rapport/IPG Mediabrands study, DOOH can increase the effectiveness of search advertising by 80%, social media by 56% and online advertising by 31%, when used as part of an omnichannel campaign.
Perhaps, most importantly, it reduces wastage – an especially important attribute when every marketing rand is being scrutinised. If you’re a coffee brand targeting morning traffic, for example, why would you need to run the same creative at dinner time? If you’re promoting a retail special in a particular suburb, why blanket an entire city unnecessarily?
The ability to deploy media more intelligently suddenly becomes incredibly valuable when every rand is under pressure to perform.
In difficult periods, localisation also becomes significantly more important. DOOH is inherently contextual. It exists in the environments where people live, shop, commute and socialise and – when used correctly – it becomes less about broad awareness and more about relevance. A well-placed message near a store, retail node or high-footfall environment can act as a direct call to action at precisely the right moment, which is particularly powerful at a time when consumers are making purchasing decisions more carefully.
We’re also seeing technology continue to lower barriers to entry into the space. Platforms like Polygon’s Prism allow smaller businesses to access digital billboard inventory in a far more flexible way, selecting specific screens, choosing certain times of day, setting daily budgets and activating campaigns similarly to how they would run social media advertising.
Moreover, aggregation – through DOOH networks such as Polygon’s – is also simplifying what has historically been a fragmented and often intimidating process for smaller advertisers. Rather than navigating multiple media owners individually, businesses can now access large networks of digital inventory through a single point of contact, making tactical DOOH buying significantly more manageable.
But this shift extends beyond SMEs. What we’re really witnessing is a wider evolution in how marketers think about media efficiency. The future of advertising probably won’t belong to the brands with the biggest budgets; it will belong to the brands that can deploy those budgets most intelligently. That means understanding audiences more deeply, reducing wastage, prioritising relevance, integrating channels more effectively – and remaining visible even when the instinct during difficult times is to retreat.
Because while economic cycles eventually recover, lost consumer attention is often much harder – and far more expensive – to claw back.
Remi du Preez
Managing Director
