• by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, June 28, 2012

Online video advertising is a powerful tool to boost the reach and effectiveness of a TV campaign, according to a comScore report on cross-media marketing. If an advertiser allocates 90% of a campaign to TV and 10% to digital video, that mix can increase the reach by 5 percentage points and the effectiveness by 16 percentage points, comScore said.

The combination also often increases visits to a brand Web site, comScore said. Viewers who saw one ad on TV and one ad online for the same brand were 28% more likely to check out the brand’s Web site than consumers who were exposed to just a TV ad. While those numbers may point more to the necessity of multiple exposures in general for marketing to elicit an action, they also illustrate the value in layering in digital components to make a TV campaign truly pop.

The findings jibe with other important digital studies. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s recent study on multiscreen marketing also found that additional devices and screens increase the recall of TV ads. More than half of viewers with tablets, TV, smartphones and computers could recall the ads that had run on their favorite shows. Also, 61% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 44 who used four screens could recall the ads in their top shows.