Border closures, lockdowns and social distancing pose massive challenges to physical retailers in the lead up to Christmas.

Many brands have successfully pivoted to ecommerce and accelerated digital transitions. Meanwhile, despite Covid’s economic impact, research suggests seven in ten consumers plan to maintain festive spending.

But in a fragmented media environment, how do retailers replicate discovery – how can they convert window shoppers to buyers without shop windows?

Enter TV

Before you stop reading, this is not Think TV pushing TV advertising as the panacea. It’s not. But TV will, along with the right mix of other mass media, drive audiences to online stores.  TV delivers discovery, builds bigger brands and is a powerful catalyst in converting awareness and intent into purchases.

During Covid, audiences for TV in all its forms have increased exponentially, up to 30% at the height of the pandemic, with families and housemates also watching more shows together.

With family shopping expeditions curtailed for obvious reasons, we think this shift in behaviour positions TV to become the new storefront, especially this Christmas, as brands must adapt to survive in the new consumer environment.

TV drives brand searches and purchases

When a product is featured on TV, consumers go looking for it by name. It’s the difference between searching for a tablet and searching for an Apple iPad.

Don’t just take our word for it.

Online tradie marketplace Hipages used to allocate most of its marketing budget to paid search. Last year it switched tactics and reweighted spend to include TV, with immediate results, including more app downloads and a marked increase in branded search as consumers came directly to them, according to chief customer officer, Stuart Tucker.

“We were swamped with inquiries,” says Tucker. Meanwhile, the brand was able to reduce the cost of paid search in a cluttered and expensive category.

Hipages isn’t an outlier. According to the UK research piece Demand Generation, online brands see greater increases in base sales when TV is used as part of the advertising mix. The research found TV acts as a demand generator by targeting broadly to widen the pool of customers.

Which is why online retailers such as Temple & Webster and electronics business Kogan have both seen rapid growth off the back of increased TV investment during the pandemic.

With the festive season fast approaching, retailers need to put themselves in the shop window present in every Australian home – and use TV to drive digital retail results.