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How to Pick The Right TV Advertising Solutions to Understand Viewership and Subscriptions

  • - Tara Franceschini
  • 3 min read

Amidst the complex fragmentation of the TV market – and of viewing behaviors – having accurate insights into your consumers is critical for understanding where and how to effectively reach them. With the latest market trends pointing to an uptick in ad spend and continued surges in the wide range of digital channels, media companies must balance how their marketing budgets drive tune-in and subscriptions just like any other advertiser would.

Being able to accurately measure the impact of your digital investment in order to track how your tune-in campaign performed along with what subscriptions were garnered is the exact type of marketing optimizations needed in this era of media fragmentation and required accountability.

Market pressures

Every sell-side player is dealing with fragmentation in viewership. Being able to utilize online advertising to drive tune-in to your premium programming and drive streaming subscriptions can help to break through the clutter and remain competitive.

Media companies are facing a number of complicated market drivers. At the highest level, an extremely fragmented and competitive streaming market has made it tougher to gain new subscribers, and tougher to keep them amidst heavy churn. At the same time, content is expensive to produce; with the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors’ Guild strikes slowing the development of new content, as well as driving up the costs of producing future content, costs here will continue to trend upwards. Additionally, events like the 2024 Olympics – and in the US election cycle – will drive viewing behaviors in unpredictable ways, and streamers need to be able to navigate their tune-in campaigns to maximize their effectiveness.

Media companies can invest in online advertising to remain competitive, but must quantify and understand the impact of their investments.

The keys are already there

When choosing TV advertising solutions, quantifying media investments across the ecosystem and streamlining investment are the must-haves to enable better outcomes.

Understanding media investments helps measure consumer behavior across screens, and track how advertising impacts viewership, tune-ins, and subscriptions, across other metrics. This also helps to improve campaign efficiency and accurately attribute viewership behaviors to online campaigns, as well as optimize these campaigns for effectiveness.

How LiveRamp works

Working with an identity spine enables advertisers to connect across the ecosystem and understand advertising impact on lower-funnel outcomes:

  • Advertisers are able to connect automatic content recognition (ACR) viewership data and first-party subscriber data by using LiveRamp’s pseudonymous, person-based identifier, RampID.
  • RampIDs are then matched to partner platform IDs, like those of Display and Video 360 (DV360) and Meta, enabling measurement of outcomes on these platforms.
  • These partners are able to connect ad exposures to tune-ins and generate attribution reports, enabling advertisers to better quantify the impact of ad spend.

Advertisers should prioritize solutions that enable the use cases they need, including ecosystem connectivity – specifically to ACR data providers, platforms, and walled gardens, enabling not only timely measurement, but also insights where advertisers need them. These capabilities should also include being conscious of consumer privacy, including leveraging pseudonymous identity, and protecting consumers’ personal information.

Taking the next steps towards better insights with LiveRamp

Better investments and strategy start with better insights across the ecosystem. When deciding on the right TV advertising solution, it’s critical to have insight into viewership and consumer behavior to enable this.

To take the next steps with your measurement journey, read LiveRamp’s ebook, “ Maximizing Convergent TV in 2023.”