Remember when TV was the small screen? Back then, what we now call cell phones were car phones, and mobile advertising was a billboard on the side of a bus.
How times have changed. And how imperative it is for TV to claim its place in today’s customer experience as a measurable channel for reaching consumers, especially as spending on digital advertising has surpassed TV for the first time.
At RampUp on the Road in New York, five executives discussed this imperative during the panel, “Emerging Advanced TV Trends.” Each provided advice on how brands and agencies can approach advanced TV—the umbrella term encompassing addressable TV, connected TV, TV everywhere, video on demand, programmatic TV, and audience-based buying—to help advertisers win hearts, minds, and wallets.
Advanced TV brings TV into the measurable realm—a giant leap forward.
“When you start measuring the effectiveness of TV, you’re asking TV to do something it’s not been asked to do,” said Jason Malmud, GM, Advertising at Verizon. “Now we’re entering a space because we have all this data and can tie ad exposure in homes to actual results.”
TV is the latest platform to be grappling with proving campaign effectiveness and its role in omnichannel marketing. Executives from NBC Universal, its rivals, video distributors, and others in the ecosystem recently convened to try to come up with universal standards.
While standardization is an important end goal, so is the journey and understanding which metrics make sense to track for advertisers and platforms. “The first report back can be more insightful than the data used for upfront planning,” Justin Evans, VP, Data Strategy, Comcast Spotlight, said. “If you even have just a few new networks that were surprising to the client, it’s worth it.”
With these insights, brands can test through advanced TV just as they do on digital platforms and channels. “The number one thing TuneIn wanted to test with their local TV ad buys was which creative drives the most conversions. They used this data to inform their bigger national buys,” Joanna Thissen, VP, Addressable Sales at One2One Media, shared.
Brands can also run linear versus nonlinear TV tests to better understand their audiences.
“Brands can look at different behaviors across different platforms and geographies to send different messages. In L.A., most sports are watched nonlinear. That may not be the case in Cleveland due to the weather. For NY1 [a local New York City network], nonlinear viewing is very high relative to other outlets. You won’t see this on the broadcast side,” Fred Bucher, CMO at Spectrum Reach, said.
Malmud echoed this sentiment of testing and learning what works best across TV and TV-like platforms: “You can target with addressable TV and use data-driven linear TV for branding.”
However brands approach advanced TV, they can’t expect to see the same results as they would on other platforms. Super Bowl ads and sponsored snaps on Snapchat are used for entirely different purposes, hence their disparate price tags. What marketers need to do today is test different audience-based buys, determine which KPIs make sense, and see if the big tentpole buys on the original small screen make sense.