The AdSpace Wormhole — Connecting digital and TV ad industry
So I was watching an episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S yesterday & it triggered my synapses to the very fact of how the TV marketing industry has evolved since the first launch of a TV Advertisement back in 1941. This goes to prove that TV advertainment has been one of the key strategies for brands to enhance awareness & expand the audience to reach around the globe.
With the Digital industry taking over a majority of the markets and the number of active internet users increasing by the second, most of the consumer product brands & B-to-B companies have revised their strategies by redirecting the focus on digital marketing. However, a survey conducted by the Leichtman Research Group in 2018 says that there are still about 78% of households actively engaging with traditional satellite or Cable TV.
This is a significant number for viewers who still prefer to watch shows over the Television sets rather than engaging with content on online streaming networks. As these customers are actively available offline, TV commercials can be a primary reach strategy for these users. However, studies show that the TV commercials are overexposed only to 20% of the target audience with high frequency, the mid-40% of the users are reached with lower frequency, while the rest 40% of the viewers are barely exposed to the commercials. This essentially proves that brands tend to miss out on reaching 40% of the potential audience effectively.
For clients in the entertainment advertising industry, losing out on 40% of the viewership would be huge lost opportunity. This is where digital media marketing steps in to play the role. Clients can target these under-exposed users via online media by capturing the IP addresses of the users & drive them back to watch the TV show telecast via Cable.
How does second-screen targeting works?
Let’s take a hypothetical scenario of a new TV show — Life in the wild that is soon to be launched by National Geography. Say Nat Geo has been actively running Tv commercials for about 5 weeks before the premiere date. By the end of the first 4 weeks, Nat Geo observed the above-mentioned trend in their targeting strategy & identify that they are missing out on 40% of the potential viewers for new TV show premier.
With multiple TV data providers like Vizio, Hulu, LG, etc…, it is no more a difficult job to identify all the viewers who have been exposed to a TV commercial. The standard identifier for most of these datasets is a unique TV identifier, an acronym for which is TV ID, additionally, the IP ADDRESSES to which this TV ID is mapped helps us target these audiences with greater efficacy. IP addresses can be categorized into different groups based on the exposure rate — to an example above in 5 quintile groups. Once the under-exposed IP addresses are identified, these can be easily pushed to any DSP for digital targeting.
There can be different tactics layered to ensure optimum reach of user conversions. A couple of them being — applying optimal frequency cap based on TV ad exposure frequency, targeting users who watch similar or competitor TV shows or networks etcetera. Based on these strategies, you can distribute the media spends appropriately & analyze the performance mid-campaign or post-campaign.
How to measure effectiveness?
Let’s continue with the same example here. Now that we have run a digital media campaign for the advertiser, we can analyze the impact created by single-screen targeting (Users exposed to TV commercials only) Vs. second-screen targeting (Users exposed to both TV commercials & Digital creatives).
For entertainment vertical, Nielsen defines an industry standard for measuring quality/engaged TV viewers by defining a duration threshold of viewing at least 6 mins of each airing/episode of the TV show. This is a vertical standard for defining quality users for any TV content. Any users who have met the Nielsen criteria successfully are defined as a tuned-in viewer & the share of tuned-in viewers to all viewers is defined as the tune-in rate.
Based on the above context, we can identify how effective was the digital campaign in driving users to watch the TV show airings.
Analysis (A): Analyze the tune-in rate for the premier episode for users exposed to TV commercials only and user exposed to both TV commercials & Digital creative
Direct quantification can be derived by calculating:
Absolute Lift = Tune-In Rate for TV + Digital Media — Tune-In Rate for TV Only Commercials
Lift (%) = Absolute Lift / Tune-In Rate for TV Only Commercials
In the below example,
Absolute Lift = 72% — 64% = 8 % points, Lift = 8 / 64 = 12.5%
(B): Analyze the time spent per user for the premier episode for users exposed to TV commercials only and user exposed to both TV commercials & Digital creative & Numbers of airings per user over a longer period
These three sets of insights would have given you a thorough understanding of how digital strategies should be complimenting Traditional TV media strategies. Furthermore, this ends in cementing a much more data-driven approach to client problems. These sets of insights can be extended on creative or a strategy level — based on which, your understanding of the tactics that worked better in driving higher tuned-in viewers would augment. Allowing you to put in effective data-driven learnings for Digital Campaigns.
