Broadcast Advertising Still Works. Here’s When to Use It.

Broadcast advertising remains one of the most powerful tools for building brand awareness at scale, particularly when a business needs to reach audiences who are not yet in the market. Television and radio can put a brand in front of millions of people who would never click a search ad, never visit a landing page, and never respond to a retargeting pixel. That is not a weakness of broadcast. That is the point.

The challenge is that most marketers today have been trained to optimise for what is measurable, not what is effective. Broadcast sits awkwardly in that world. It creates demand rather than capturing it, which means the results show up downstream, in search volume, in direct traffic, in sales conversations that start with “I saw your ad.” Getting comfortable with that lag is one of the harder things to do in a performance-obsessed environment.

Why Broadcast Fell Out of Favour (and Why That Was Partly Wrong)

When digital advertising matured, broadcast took a reputational hit it did not entirely deserve. The argument went like this: digital is measurable, broadcast is not, therefore digital is better. Entire planning cycles shifted toward lower-funnel channels. Performance marketing budgets ballooned. Brand budgets got squeezed.

Earlier in my career, I made that same mistake. I overvalued lower-funnel performance because the numbers were clean and the attribution felt reassuring. It took a few years of watching businesses plateau before I understood what was actually happening. A lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The person who already knew the brand, already had the intent, clicked the paid search ad and got counted as a conversion. The channel looked efficient. The business was not growing.

The analogy I keep coming back to is a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy it than someone who walks past the window. Broadcast advertising is the window. It creates the initial awareness, the first impression, the reason someone eventually walks through the door. If you only invest in the till, you run out of customers.

This is not an argument against performance marketing. It is an argument for understanding what each channel actually does, and building a media mix that reflects commercial reality rather than measurement convenience. If you are thinking about how broadcast fits into a broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full planning framework.

What Broadcast Advertising Actually Does

Broadcast advertising, at its most basic, is the use of television and radio to deliver a message to a large, often undifferentiated audience. That reach is the product. You are not buying a click or a conversion. You are buying exposure, and the value of that exposure compounds over time through brand familiarity, category association, and top-of-mind awareness.

Television in particular has a quality that digital cannot replicate: it commands attention in a way that most other media does not. A well-placed television spot, in the right context, with the right creative, can shift how an audience feels about a brand in thirty seconds. That emotional transfer is not easy to measure, but it is real, and it has commercial consequences.

Radio works differently. It is intimate, local, and habit-driven. People listen to the same stations at the same times, which makes it a reliable frequency tool. If you need to reinforce a message that television has already established, or if you are targeting a specific geography, radio often delivers better value per pound than almost any other medium.

The distinction that matters for planning purposes is the difference between reach and targeting. Broadcast is a reach medium. It is designed to find people who are not looking for you. That is fundamentally different from search, which finds people who are already looking. Both are necessary. Neither replaces the other.

When Broadcast Makes Commercial Sense

Broadcast is not the right answer for every business or every stage of growth. The decision should be driven by commercial objectives, not by what the media agency recommends or what competitors are doing.

There are four situations where broadcast tends to earn its budget. First, when you are entering a new market and need to establish category presence quickly. Second, when your performance channels have plateaued and the growth ceiling is awareness, not conversion. Third, when you are defending market share against a competitor who is building brand equity through mass media. Fourth, when you are launching a product that requires explanation or emotional context that a banner ad cannot provide.

I have seen businesses in all four situations. The ones that used broadcast well did so because they had a clear answer to the question: what does success look like, and how will we know if this worked? That is a harder question than it sounds when the attribution is indirect, but it is the right question to start with.

The businesses that used broadcast badly were the ones that bought it because it felt like the right thing to do at a certain revenue threshold. They had no hypothesis about what it would change, no baseline measurement, and no way to connect the investment to commercial outcomes. They spent the money, saw some brand tracking movement, and could not tell the board whether it had worked. That is an expensive way to learn nothing.

Understanding where broadcast fits within a broader go-to-market approach is worth reading about separately. The Vidyard piece on why GTM feels harder is a useful framing for why channel decisions are getting more complex, not less.

The Creative Problem Nobody Talks About Enough

Broadcast amplifies your message. That sounds like a good thing, and it is, if the message is strong. If the message is weak, you are paying to broadcast mediocrity at scale.

I judged at the Effie Awards, which are the closest thing the industry has to a rigorous effectiveness standard. The campaigns that won were almost never the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones where the creative idea and the media placement were genuinely aligned with a commercial objective. The brief was clear. The execution was disciplined. The measurement framework was honest.

What struck me most was how rarely that combination appeared. Most submissions had either strong creative with no commercial logic, or clear commercial logic with forgettable creative. The ones that had both were rare, and they were almost always the ones that had worked.

My first week at Cybercom, there was a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. My internal reaction was not confidence. It was closer to controlled panic. But working through that brief under pressure taught me something that has stayed with me: the best broadcast ideas are almost always simple. One clear thought, expressed with precision, given room to breathe. Guinness understood that. The campaigns that endure are the ones that trusted a single idea rather than trying to say everything.

If you are planning a broadcast campaign and the creative brief has more than one central message, the brief is wrong. Broadcast does not reward complexity. It rewards clarity.

How to Measure What Broadcast Actually Does

The measurement problem with broadcast is real, but it is not as intractable as most people claim. The mistake is trying to measure broadcast the way you measure paid search. Different channels require different measurement frameworks.

There are several approaches that work in practice. Brand tracking studies, run before and after a campaign, give you a read on awareness, consideration, and preference movement. Econometric modelling, when done properly, can isolate the contribution of broadcast to sales over time. Geo-testing, running broadcast in some markets and not others, gives you a controlled comparison. None of these are perfect. All of them are more honest than pretending the channel does not exist because it does not appear in your attribution model.

One proxy that is often underused is search volume. When a television campaign runs, branded search typically rises. If it does not, either the campaign is not landing or the media weight is too light. Monitoring that relationship gives you a near-real-time signal without requiring a full econometric study.

The BCG work on go-to-market strategy in financial services makes a useful point about measurement: the goal is honest approximation, not false precision. That is exactly right. You do not need to know to the penny what broadcast contributed. You need to know whether the investment is directionally worthwhile and whether the commercial indicators are moving in the right direction.

Broadcast in the Context of a Full Channel Mix

Broadcast works best when it is not doing everything. The most effective campaigns I have seen treat television and radio as the top of a coordinated system, where mass reach creates awareness that other channels then convert.

The practical implication is that broadcast spend should be accompanied by investment in the channels that capture the demand it creates. If you run a television campaign and your paid search budget is too thin to capture the branded queries it generates, you are leaving money on the table. If your website cannot handle the traffic spike, or the landing experience does not match the promise of the ad, the broadcast investment is partially wasted.

This is where a lot of businesses underinvest in coordination. They treat broadcast as a separate workstream from digital, managed by different teams with different objectives. The television team hits their reach and frequency targets. The digital team hits their cost-per-acquisition targets. Nobody is accountable for whether the two are working together. The result is a media plan that looks coherent on paper and underperforms in practice.

When I was growing a team from around twenty people to over a hundred at iProspect, one of the structural decisions that made the biggest difference was breaking down the separation between brand and performance planning. Not merging them into one undifferentiated team, but creating enough shared accountability that the people buying television understood what it was supposed to do for search, and the people buying search understood what they owed to the brand investment upstream. That coordination is harder to build than a media plan. It is also worth more.

For businesses thinking about how to structure that kind of integrated approach, the Semrush overview of market penetration strategy is a useful starting point for understanding how reach and conversion work together as a growth lever.

Television vs Radio: Choosing the Right Broadcast Medium

The choice between television and radio is not always obvious, and it is rarely either/or. The right answer depends on budget, objective, geography, and audience.

Television has the broadest reach and the highest production cost. It is the right choice when you need emotional impact, when you are building or defending a brand position at scale, or when the visual dimension of the product or service is central to the message. The cost of entry is higher, which means it is typically more appropriate for businesses with established revenue and a clear hypothesis about what the investment will change.

Radio is cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy. It is particularly effective for local or regional campaigns, for frequency reinforcement of an existing message, and for categories where audio context matters, such as financial services, automotive, and retail. A radio campaign can be live in days rather than weeks, which gives it a flexibility that television cannot match.

Connected television and streaming audio are changing the landscape. They bring some of the targeting precision of digital to broadcast formats, which addresses one of the traditional criticisms of the medium. But they also bring the same fragmentation and measurement complexity that makes digital planning harder. They are worth including in the mix, but they are not a replacement for understanding what broadcast fundamentally does.

The broader question of how channel selection fits into a growth planning framework is something I cover in more depth across the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section of The Marketing Juice. Channel decisions do not exist in isolation, and broadcast is no exception.

The Honest Case for Broadcast in a Digital-First World

Broadcast advertising is not a legacy medium that digital has made obsolete. It is a reach medium that does something digital cannot do at the same scale, which is put a brand in front of people who are not looking for it, in a context that commands attention, with enough creative space to create genuine emotional resonance.

The businesses that have walked away from broadcast entirely because it is hard to measure have often found that their growth has stalled in ways that performance optimisation cannot fix. You can squeeze more efficiency out of a paid search account for a long time. At some point, you run out of people who already know you. Growth beyond that point requires reaching people who do not.

That is what broadcast does. It is not glamorous in a world of real-time dashboards and fractional attribution. But it works, and it has worked for long enough that the burden of proof should be on the people who say it does not, not on the medium itself.

The planning question is not whether broadcast works. It is whether it is the right tool for your specific commercial objective at this specific moment in your business. Answer that question honestly, build the measurement framework before you spend the money, and coordinate the investment with the channels that will convert the demand it creates. That is the discipline that separates broadcast campaigns that earn their budget from the ones that generate a nice showreel and not much else.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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