Traditional Media Channels Are Being Wasted. Here’s How to Fix That.

Traditional media channels still reach audiences that digital cannot replicate at scale, but most brands use them in ways that were already outdated a decade ago. The opportunity is not in abandoning television, print, radio, or out-of-home, but in deploying them with the kind of strategic intent that most digital-first planning teams have never applied to them.

The brands getting the most from traditional media right now are not spending more. They are thinking differently about what these channels are actually for, who they reach, and how they connect to the rest of the commercial system.

Why Traditional Media Fell Out of Favour for the Wrong Reasons

When I was running agencies through the early digital growth years, the conversation about traditional media followed a predictable pattern. A client would ask why they were spending on television when they could see exactly how many clicks their paid search was generating. The performance dashboard made digital look like a precision instrument and traditional media look like guesswork.

The problem is that I was partly responsible for that framing. Most of us in agency leadership were. We oversold the measurability of digital and undersold the strategic value of reach. It took me years of managing large, mixed-channel budgets across 30-odd industries to understand that what we were measuring in digital was mostly demand capture, not demand creation. Someone who had already decided to buy was clicking our ads. Traditional media was often doing the earlier, harder work of making them want to buy in the first place, and we were giving it no credit for that.

This is not a nostalgic argument for traditional media. It is a commercial argument. If your growth strategy depends on reaching new audiences rather than recycling existing intent, you need channels that reach people who are not searching yet. That is what traditional media does, and it is something that most performance-first strategies structurally ignore. For a broader perspective on how this fits into commercial growth planning, the articles across Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy cover the full picture.

What Does “Unique Use” Actually Mean in This Context?

When marketers talk about unique uses of traditional media, they often mean tactical creativity: a clever billboard, a radio spot with an unusual format, a newspaper ad that does something unexpected with the page. That is part of it, but it is the smaller part.

The more significant opportunity is strategic. It is about using traditional channels to do jobs that brands have stopped asking them to do, because the industry defaulted to using them the same way it always had, or stopped using them entirely. Three of those jobs stand out.

The first is audience priming. Traditional media reaches people before they are in a buying cycle. A well-placed out-of-home campaign or a well-timed radio spot can shift how an audience thinks about a category or a brand before any purchase intent exists. When that person later encounters a digital touchpoint, their response is different because of what they saw or heard earlier. The digital channel gets the conversion credit. The traditional channel did the work that made conversion possible.

The second is trust signalling. There is a reason challenger brands that want to be taken seriously still run television campaigns. Appearing on broadcast media carries an implicit endorsement that digital advertising, however targeted, does not replicate. When I was working with a financial services client trying to grow in a market dominated by established players, the television investment was not about direct response. It was about making the brand feel like it belonged in the same category as the incumbents. That perception shift was measurable in brand tracking, and it preceded a meaningful improvement in conversion rates on digital channels.

The third is competitive space. Most mid-sized brands have retreated from traditional media entirely. That means the brands willing to invest there are operating in a less cluttered environment than they would have found ten years ago. The cost-per-thousand on television is not what it was, and neither is the competition for attention in print or on outdoor. For brands with the right audience fit, this is an underpriced opportunity.

Out-of-Home as a Contextual Layer, Not a Standalone Channel

Out-of-home is probably the most interesting traditional channel right now, partly because digital out-of-home has made it more flexible and partly because the creative possibilities have expanded. But the most underused application is not the digital screen. It is the strategic use of location and context to change how other media performs.

Placing out-of-home near competitor locations, near points of sale, or in environments where your target audience is in a particular mental state is not new. What is underused is the deliberate sequencing of out-of-home with digital retargeting. A consumer sees your brand on a billboard during their commute. Later that day, they encounter a retargeted social ad. The second touchpoint performs better because the first one happened. Most brands are not measuring this connection, which means most brands are not planning for it.

I have seen this work in retail contexts where the brand had strong out-of-home presence near shopping centres. The digital retargeting campaigns running alongside those placements consistently outperformed equivalent campaigns in markets without the out-of-home support. The lift was not enormous, but it was consistent and it was real. The challenge was convincing clients to attribute any of it to the billboards rather than to the digital execution.

Radio and Podcast Adjacency: The Attention Economy’s Quiet Corner

Radio has been declared dead so many times that the people who still listen to it have stopped paying attention to the obituaries. The reality is that radio reaches audiences during moments of captive attention that digital struggles to match: the commute, the gym, the kitchen. These are not distracted scrolling moments. They are lean-back moments where the medium has a share of attention that most digital formats cannot buy.

The unique opportunity here is not just in the radio spot itself. It is in the connection between radio and search behaviour. A well-constructed radio campaign with a distinctive brand name or a memorable call to action drives branded search volume. That search volume is then captured by digital channels, which take the credit for the conversion. If you are running radio and not tracking the corresponding lift in branded search, you are almost certainly undervaluing it.

The adjacency to podcasting is worth noting. Podcast advertising shares many of the same characteristics as radio: captive attention, host endorsement, lean-back consumption. Brands that understand how to use radio well tend to transfer those skills to podcast advertising more effectively than brands that have never worked with audio. The underlying logic is the same even if the targeting and measurement mechanics are different.

Print’s Narrow but Real Remaining Value

Print is the channel where I am most careful about making broad claims. The audience has fragmented significantly, and the case for print depends heavily on the specific publication, the target audience, and the creative execution. There are contexts where print remains genuinely effective and contexts where the investment is driven more by habit or executive preference than by commercial logic.

Where print still earns its place is in high-consideration, high-trust categories. Financial services, luxury goods, professional services, and healthcare are all categories where appearing in a respected publication carries credibility that a digital ad cannot replicate. The reader of a specialist trade publication or a quality broadsheet is in a different mental state than someone scrolling a social feed. That mental state affects how they process and retain brand information.

The unique application here is using print not as a mass-reach channel but as a precision credibility tool. A single well-placed full-page advertisement in the right publication, timed to coincide with a sales push or a product launch, can do things for brand perception that no amount of digital spend replicates. I have watched this work in B2B contexts where a client’s sales team reported that prospects were referencing the print advertisement in meetings. That kind of salience is hard to manufacture with programmatic display.

Understanding how these channels fit into a broader growth architecture is something BCG’s work on commercial transformation addresses well, particularly the relationship between brand investment and commercial momentum. The argument for maintaining brand-building channels even under commercial pressure is not sentimental. It is structural.

Television at the Edges: Where Broadcast Still Creates Disproportionate Returns

Television is expensive, which means it is often the first thing cut when budgets tighten and the last thing added back when they recover. But the brands that maintain television investment through cycles tend to emerge from downturns in stronger positions than those that cut entirely. This is not an accident.

The disproportionate returns from television come from two places. The first is the share-of-voice dynamic: when competitors cut television, the brands that stay visible gain a larger share of audience attention for the same or lower spend. The second is the long-term brand equity effect, which is well-documented in effectiveness literature even if it is chronically underweighted in short-term planning cycles.

The unique application that most brands miss is using television specifically to reach audiences that digital cannot address at scale. Connected television and addressable TV have made it possible to use broadcast-quality creative with audience targeting that approaches digital precision. This is not the same as traditional broadcast buying, but it uses the same creative format and the same trust signals. For brands that have retreated from television entirely because of cost or measurement concerns, addressable TV is worth a serious look.

The Effie Awards, which I have had the opportunity to judge, consistently surface campaigns where traditional media played a central role in the most commercially effective work. The pattern is not that traditional media worked in isolation. It is that the campaigns that won were built on a clear understanding of what each channel was doing and why. The television component was not there because it had always been there. It was there because it was doing something that no other channel in the plan could do.

The Measurement Problem and Why It Creates a Self-Fulfilling Cycle

The single biggest barrier to better use of traditional media is not budget. It is measurement. Most brands measure traditional media poorly, use that poor measurement as evidence that it does not work, cut the investment, and then wonder why their digital channels are less efficient than they used to be.

The measurement challenge is real. Traditional media does not produce the clean attribution data that digital channels generate. But that does not mean it is unmeasurable. Brand tracking, sales uplift analysis, media mix modelling, and the kind of controlled regional testing that any serious marketing operation should be running can all shed light on what traditional media is contributing. The problem is that these approaches require more analytical rigour and more patience than last-click attribution, so most teams default to the easier measurement rather than the more accurate one.

I spent years watching clients make budget decisions based on what was measurable rather than what was effective. Performance marketing looked accountable because every click was tracked. Traditional media looked unaccountable because the contribution was harder to isolate. The reality, which becomes clear when you run proper media mix models, is often the opposite of what the attribution data suggests. The channels that look most efficient in a last-click model are frequently the channels that are harvesting demand created elsewhere in the plan.

For context on how growth-oriented companies approach measurement and market penetration, Semrush’s analysis of market penetration strategies is a useful reference point for understanding why reach-based investment matters alongside conversion-focused activity. The logic applies equally to channel planning.

How to Build a Mixed-Channel Plan That Uses Traditional Media Well

The practical question is how to integrate traditional media into a plan that is dominated by digital infrastructure, digital measurement, and digital-first planning teams. There is no single answer, but there are principles that hold across most contexts.

Start with audience, not channel. The question is not “should we use television?” It is “where are the audiences we need to reach, and what are they doing when they are most receptive?” For some audiences, the answer points strongly toward traditional channels. For others, it does not. The mistake is deciding in advance based on habit or bias rather than evidence.

Define the job each channel is doing. Traditional media is most valuable when it is doing something that digital cannot do: reaching people before they are in a buying cycle, building trust through the implicit endorsement of a respected medium, or creating the kind of cultural presence that makes digital touchpoints more effective. If you cannot articulate what job the traditional channel is doing that digital cannot do, you probably should not be spending on it.

Plan the connections between channels deliberately. The most effective mixed-channel plans are not just a collection of individual channel strategies. They are built around the idea that each channel affects how others perform. Out-of-home primes audiences for digital retargeting. Radio drives branded search. Television builds the brand equity that makes conversion rate optimisation more effective. These connections need to be planned, not hoped for.

Invest in measurement that matches the ambition. If you are going to use traditional media seriously, you need measurement that can capture its contribution. That means brand tracking, not just performance dashboards. It means media mix modelling, not just attribution reports. It means being willing to run controlled tests in regional markets to isolate the effect of individual channels. This is more work, but it is the only way to make honest decisions about where the money should go.

Forrester’s intelligent growth model makes a similar point about the relationship between measurement sophistication and growth outcomes. Brands that invest in better measurement infrastructure tend to make better channel decisions over time, and that compounds. The brands that rely on simple attribution models tend to systematically underinvest in the channels that are hardest to measure, which often means the channels doing the most important work.

For a broader view of how channel strategy connects to commercial growth planning, the full range of perspectives on Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy covers the strategic context that individual channel decisions need to sit within. Channel planning without a clear growth strategy is just media buying.

The Creative Dimension That Most Brands Get Wrong

Traditional media rewards creative ambition in ways that digital formats often do not. A six-second pre-roll and a thirty-second television commercial are not the same creative challenge, and the brands that treat them as interchangeable tend to perform poorly in both formats.

The specific failure mode I have seen most often is brands repurposing digital creative for traditional formats. A social video cut down to a television spot. A digital banner resized for a billboard. The format changes but the creative thinking does not, and the result is work that performs below what either format is capable of delivering.

Traditional media formats have constraints and conventions that exist for reasons. The billboard has three seconds of attention. The radio spot has no visual reference. The television commercial has the ability to tell a story with emotional arc. These are not limitations to work around. They are the creative brief. Brands that understand the format deeply tend to produce work that outperforms brands that treat traditional media as a resizing exercise.

BCG’s research on go-to-market strategy in financial services touches on the role of trust-building channels in categories where credibility is a prerequisite for consideration. The creative quality of traditional media executions in those contexts is not a nice-to-have. It is directly connected to whether the channel does its job.

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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