Underscore Marketing's president explains how targeting smarter and engaging consumers not only will get brands noticed but also can save them money.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the advertising philosophy that leads brands to try to out-shout their competitors in TV and radio. I've also been thinking a lot about the media marketplace and the economic incentives for advertisers to change the way they look at their advertising.

Sustainability-wise, it's hard for the players in a category to consistently out-shout the competition. If marketing were as simple as that, we'd live in a world where every category was dominated by the number-one player. The costs for broadcast continue to accelerate from a cost-per-point perspective, and thus it's getting less and less efficient year after year to keep a brand's noise levels up. If you're not the top dog in your category, you might not be able to afford sustained levels of broadcast noise -- or at least not at the levels that might make a dent in your better-funded competitor's market share.

At the same time, you might not be comfortable with the alternatives -- experimentation with media and strategies that don't have the same track record of success as the broadcast method. To me, the two big alternatives are as follows:

Conversational marketing
Instead of shouting in a one-way fashion, have a dialogue in lowered voices that are more meaningful. I've written extensively about conversational marketing strategies over the past few years, so I won't dive into the detail here. You can refer to "Social Media Winners & Losers" if you'd like to get a refresher on conversational marketing best practices. Suffice it to say that it's an alternative to shouting over the competition because the quality of communication is better and you don't have to continually keep broadcast levels high in order to attract attention.

Shouting smarter
Okay, if you feel you must shout, at least look at the ways one can be more efficient with a media spend by doing two things: targeting ads efficiently and engaging the user. Putting the positive effects these two things will have on user experience aside for a second, look at them from the standpoint of how they might save the brand money.

I can talk all day about how my continued bombardment by Valtrex TV ads makes me want to choke the media planner responsible. I don't have herpes, so it's ridiculous for me to be exposed to ads for a herpes medication upwards of 10 times a month. I don't expect the brand's marketers to care much about my user experience, but I do expect them to care about how long they can afford to run television at a level that exposes out-of-target folks 10 times a month.

Smart ad targeting online can, wholly or partially, take the place of the TV air cover. Maybe Valtrex can't afford to sustain the levels it's currently running at in TV for the entirety of the year, but it would be able to afford to maintain a similar reach and frequency among a more targeted audience in digital.

With respect to engaging users, perhaps a brand might not be ready to engage in conversational marketing in the sense of maintaining a two-way dialogue with customers and prospects. But perhaps it can engage users such that the impression they get in digital lasts longer and doesn't require sustained levels of high frequency to keep the brand in the prospects' faces. I'm not talking about driving people to websites. I'm talking about extending brand value -- giving prospects something that they'll use and appreciate, thus keeping them engaged for longer periods of time.

By way of example, perhaps Valtrex could sponsor a community that provides a platform over which sufferers could interact. Anyone who is engaged by that proposition won't require a 10X exposure to keep the brand top of mind.

In the end, innovation in the media mix is going to make it difficult for brands that won't think in detail about how to refine their audiences and their engagement programs to operate more efficiently than they would through broadcast air cover. Paying more for less every year while their competitors are innovating will force these players to ultimately change too.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.