• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, November 7, 2014

Among the biggest challenges to creating more integrated media plans that account for a new age of fragmentation is simply understanding how screens work with one another in people’s lives. People dance across the various “touchpoints” in highly idiosyncratic ways. Knowing with any degree of certainty that cross-platform messages are reaching the intended audience is hard enough. Calculating synchronized or sequential messaging across screens is a magnitude harder.

Maybe it is best to start with just two screens.

The mobile/TV connection is in many ways the most elusive but the most plausible connection to make across platforms. The high share of people consulting their handsets and tablets during prime time (about half, by some measures) makes the connection irresistible to advertisers, and perhaps imperative. People now have a reliable, even measurable, distraction from both programming and especially TV ad pods.

A number of recent announcements have underscored the race to tie big and small screens together more effectively in the living room and beyond. Opera Mediaworks has partnered with Viggle on a new technology that lets mobile ads for TV shows add the show to the viewer’s DVR. Nielsen released a new study showing how social media conversations remind people to watch on demand a show they missed seeing live. And the universal TV remote app Peel (with over 100 million registered users now) offers TV tune-in ads that can actually change the channel on your TV from the mobile ad banner.

The two-screen dynamic in the living room is complex, but its impact on ad awareness is pretty obvious. A study from TNS commissioned by mobile marketing firm wywy found that among people who used a second screen while watching TV, ad awareness was down 58% compared to those who don’t. Clearly advertisers need to find ways to recapture those lost viewers or meld the two screen together more skillfully.

One technique is to have ads on mobile platforms synchronized with TV ads currently or recently on the main screen. The social TV company Second Screen Networks pioneered this approach several years ago and was recently acquired by German company wywy, which entered the US market this summer. Andreas Schroeter, co-founder and COO of wywy tells me that in a recent campaign for Hyundai the company synchronized both mobile ads to the TV campaign and the Hyundai site itself to reflect the TV messaging. “A lot of people see the ad [on TV] and go to the site,” he says. “We were surprised with auto customers how much of an uptick there is in site visits – 100% to 200% when an ad runs.”

For wywy, tying the TV to mobile screen is a two-part process. You may want to use a mobile ad to recapture any lost attention from your TV ad, but you also want to capitalize on those who are paying close enough attention to your TV ad to go to the Web site on their handsets. In most cases the curious mobile surfer gets a generic home page that forces them to root around for the specific product advertised. Wywy also works with the brands to synchronize both the mobile ads and the site so the product advertised is echoed on both platforms readily. In a recent set of campaigns with Hyundai in Germany, ads and sites synchronized with the TV ad increased a GRP of 605 by 16 points. It also increased mobile site visits from an 157% increase during the TV ad to a 240% increase with half the bounce rate and more than triple the conversions.

Schoeter admits that reliably matching those watching your TV ad with those getting a synchronized ad on their phone is a dark art that relies as much on probabilities as anything else right now. The company has an audio recognition technology that analyzes the live TV signals to create audio fingerprints that are matched against fingerprints of TV ads. When they know the ad is running, in real time, they can send a complementary mobile ad to demand side platforms like AppNexus or DoubleClick. “We have a probabilistic model of the likelihood that this impression we are targeting is in front of the TV,” he says. They use the demographics of the show to determine what the audience looks like and then target further. For now it is a scattershot method of very rough targeting, but even with the waste it amounts to a cheap way of extending the reach of a TV ad.

By synchronizing mobile and TV screens, advertisers should also be able to change the way they come at on-air creative. Instead of rolling the dice on a single big shoot and one big idea, mobile responses can act as meters of creative effectiveness. TV can start testing creative more efficiently in much the same way online display has done for years. Schroeter tells me wywy has already had one client that discovered a small change in on air creative drove a different online result. It was a language learning program looking to drive app downloads. When it added a small visual instruction on how to download the app it resulted in 50% more downloads. A hearing aid company was aiming to hit prime time with its ads. But testing showed greater conversions online coming from TV ads run at 10 am and 4 pm.

Just as touch points like point-of-sale, CRM, online display and email all have to synchronize better for omnichannel marketing to work, at the very least the TV and mobile screens are going to have to lurch towards some sort of complementary relationship. We know that the first stabs as “social TV” apps failed to scale. And while Twitter’s initial forays into TV extensions have proven popular, knitting together both screens at scale is still a crude and rudimentary art. When and if it works well, binding the TV and mobile screens should help not only reduce waste but open the way for much more fluid storytelling.