What is Below-the-Line Marketing and When Should You Use It?
Below-the-line (BTL) marketing is promotion aimed at a specific, defined group of people rather than a mass audience: sampling, in-store and point-of-purchase activity, direct mail, sponsorships, events and retail promotions. It is built to drive trial or purchase quickly and measurably, while above-the-line (ATL) media such as TV, radio and outdoor builds broad reach.
Where "the line" came from
The terms began as a bookkeeping device. Procter & Gamble's 1954 budget listed traditional advertising costs first, so staff drew a line below those costs and wrote promotional activity underneath it. Media booked through agencies, which then earned commission from media owners, sat above the line. Promotions with no commission attached, such as sampling, coupons and sweepstakes, sat below it.
That commission model has largely gone, and the same source notes the historical distinction "has become blurred." The labels survive because they still describe a real planning choice: are you buying reach, or are you buying a specific response from a specific group?
ATL vs BTL vs TTL
- Above the line (ATL): mass-reach media. National or regional TV, radio, print and outdoor. The goal is awareness and memory at scale, and the measure is reach, frequency and long-term brand effect.
- Below the line (BTL): targeted activity. Sampling, trade and in-store promotion, direct mail, events, sponsorships and direct-response campaigns. The goal is trial, conversion or loyalty, and the measure is redemptions, sales lift and cost per acquisition.
- Through the line (TTL): one plan where ATL and BTL work on each other. A TV spot drives people to an in-store offer; a billboard points to an app promotion. TTL is close to what we describe as integrated marketing.
Digital channels complicate the old split. A programmatic display buy can be mass reach or tightly targeted depending on how it is set up, so most planners now classify by objective rather than by channel.
When should you use BTL?
BTL earns its budget when the objective is a specific action from a reachable group:
- Launching or relaunching a product where trial is the barrier, so sampling and in-store activity remove the risk of first purchase.
- Converting demand that already exists, for example retail promotions at the shelf or in a delivery app.
- Reaching a narrow audience that mass media would waste money on, such as a trade buyer list or a specific city's commuters.
- Proving incremental sales with offers and codes that are easy to track.
BTL on its own rarely builds the memory that makes those promotions work. It converts awareness; it does not create much of it. Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA study The Long and the Short of It warns that leaning on short-term response activity at the expense of brand-building has dangerous implications for long-term success. In practice, brands that move everything into targeted, trackable activity tend to see efficiency rise and then stall as the pool of people already willing to buy shrinks.
The money is moving toward BTL-style activity anyway. WARC forecasts global retail media, the advertising that reaches shoppers on retailers' sites and apps close to the point of purchase, to grow 14.3 percent to $202.1 billion in 2026, against total ad spend of $1.34 trillion.
A through-the-line example
Vita Coco built "The Hangover Shop," a curated bundle inside grocery delivery apps: a classic BTL retail activation. Its in-house team planned to support it with an all-digital media buy. Criterion Global recommended mass-reach out-of-home instead, a mix of 85% static and 15% digital placements across the New York subway and street-level screens, to drive people to the in-app shop.
The result, set out in the Vita Coco case study, was total view time 52 times the original projection, a CPM 30% more efficient than planned and 26.8% less total investment than the client expected. The ATL layer did the reaching; the BTL activation did the converting.
How Criterion Global plans the split
We start from the objective and the size of the audience, not from a channel list. If growth depends on people who do not yet know the brand, reach media leads and BTL harvests the response. If the audience is small, known and close to purchase, BTL can carry the plan. Our paid media team plans both sides together, including retail media, so promotions and the reach that feeds them are measured as one investment.