Commentary

TV's Renaissance Will Be Born From Better Attribution Data

TV advertising currently generates $200 billion in annual revenue globally – and it continues to grow at an impressive rate. Driven by an increase in investment from Internet giants Google, Facebook and Netflix, TV ad spend reached a recording-breaking GBP5.27 billion last year in the UK alone. Attracted by the scale and influence of TV, online businesses spent more than £500 million overall, making them the second-biggest spending group of TV advertisers.

Creating TV ads is a costly and resource-intensive process, but one where advertisers and brands continue to struggle with quickly and accurately proving a campaign’s effectiveness and impact on ROI. Any other part of a business spending that much time and money would be required to have rock-solid, data-backed metrics to prove its success. For TV to deliver on this spend and maintain its position as a leading channel, better, more accurate and timely measurement and optimisation techniques — much like those used in digital media — will be crucial.

So how can TV advertising better prove its worth?

The short answer is through better attribution -- and the analytical technologies to make that happen exist today. The long answer begins with e-commerce and leveraging the behavioural insights that stem from it.

Thanks to online shopping, we can now use cookies to identify individual consumers in the digital sphere and track them as they move across a variety of channels and devices. Technology can collate interactions along the path to purchase — both online and offline — and link them to ads delivered on specific channels.

For example, a consumer may watch a TV ad, then feel inspired to search for the featured product online using his or her smartphone, and eventually follow a link in a retargeted Facebook ad to purchase it on a laptop. The part each channel plays in driving the sale is clear — including TV as the initial point of interest.

Traditionally, TV ad buying has centered around ratings, which offer limited targeting options and even less insight into the impact of ads. What’s more, post-logs, which are usually available weeks after broadcast, are far too late to be useable. But new, timely data sources -- such as spot, response and location data -- are now enabling advertisers to measure TV ad campaigns, pinpoint the most receptive audiences and allocate budget accordingly.

Advertisers can now use location data to detect the moment an ad is broadcast and gauge its impact on the audience in near-real time with response data, generating a same-day view of ROI. Anonymised cookies can track the impact of TV ads on the digital world quickly and efficiently, making it easier to see what is working, what isn’t and allowing advertisers to optimise campaigns instantly for better results. Intelligent algorithms can analyse performance “in-flight,”’ adjusting the time, day or channel on which an ad is served for maximum engagement. 

With the investment in TV continuing to boom and data affording new ways to measure and optimise its effectiveness, TV advertising is an industry at the dawn of its renaissance. 

2 comments about "TV's Renaissance Will Be Born From Better Attribution Data".
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  1. Leonard Zachary from T___n__, March 8, 2016 at 12:13 p.m.

    This can only happen by having deep access within the mobile connectivity layer which broadacsters at least in the U.S. are way behind the technology positioning required...yes distribaution is worth more than content, just look at Google and FB.

    what say you Ed? any Attribution lately? relying on a 50 year old product without Attribution is not a viable strategy for the next 5 or 10 years....

  2. Megan Coyle from TVSquared, March 17, 2016 at 11:50 a.m.

    Consider the following: A randomly selected, large online insurance company has a round 3M visits a month. Of the traffic that comes to the site, 73.9% comes from Search and Direct; three quarters of the traffic is not attributable to a marketing source. If that much traffic is information poor, what does that tell me about any attribution? (source SimilarWeb)

     

    Now look at what TVSquared does. We simply show you how much of that traffic was specifically activated by TV AND by what TV program; the actual spot. In addition, we do that in hours, not in weeks, providing same-day feedback the advertiser can use to change the media plan and optimize it to appropriate KPI - be that visits, registrations, abandoned carts or purchases.

     

    This happens at the top of the funnel, be that website or app integration, allowing for quick, effortless integration and access to get to what matters: results.

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