• by Justin Evans , October 3, 2014

As the industry focuses on programmatic TV as an exciting, emerging way to shore up brands’ network TV schedules, it is sometimes easy to forget that one medium is already acting as a highly targeted complement to TV: digital.

Pairing advertising from multiple channels to create a greater impact is not a new idea. In fact, most marketers and admen have believed this to be a successful tactic since before the buzzwords “audience targeting” were known in the realm of measured media. Multichannel marketing tactics have been applied to radio, print -- any tool marketers use to communicate with their customers.

What’s different today is that, especially in digital, the level of sophistication and science supporting these tactics has grown -- in both targeting and measurement.

The basic concept is the following: Delivering the same TV ad multiple times to the same person is not as effective as delivering that ad on TV and digital.

Several years ago, Collective led the industry with a tool to create this media dynamic, with a product called TV Accelerator. Using set-top-box data from Rentrak and other sources, Collective links TV viewing behavior to a targeted ad campaign online.

Experience with this product, and consistent research, has proven the original hypothesis -- about audiences’ responses to multichannel media -- correct. Collective tracked results from 70 measured campaigns over several years to show that attitudinal metrics were lifted by double digits when ads were aligned between TV and digital.

The opportunities for multiscreen alignment here are sophisticated. Data players like Rentrak supply TV viewing data to the tune of tens of millions of households, pulling in second-by-second data including time-shifted viewing. The scale and sophistication of real-time bidding in digital makes the coordination of TV and digital ads possible so they can be paired chronologically with a high level of control. This approach is powerful: research conducted by Collective and the IPG Media Lab showed a 34% jump in effectiveness when multiscreen ads were paired within a few minutes.

But in all the science we can lose track of a brand’s opportunity to use these tools. And they boil down to a handful of tactics that are very familiar to advocates of programmatic TV:

Adding frequency for more impact. As today’s consumer is barraged with ads across all media, and, according to Ipsos, is now living a “media day” that’s actually longer than 24 hours, controlled and coordinated frequency can be a brand’s lifeline to its customers.

Adding reach. Not all of a brand’s target audience will see its TV ads (unless that brand is one of the lucky multibillion-dollar franchises playing ads 24/7). Through the science of audience targeting, a brand’s customers who miss the TV schedule can be selected and shown a digital ad, thus reducing audience gaps, and adding millions of potential customers into the funnel.

Driving tune-in for networks. TV networks promoting new shows have shown an eagerness for granular TV viewing data. The reason is fairly clear: Networks can find audiences based on a deep drill-down into TV viewing data, to mine for exactly the viewers they seek. These may be fans of a particular star or of a particular genre, or loyalists who watched season one of a program and then fell away -- who may be revitalized with a shot of digital marketing. It may be the ultimate compliment to audience targeting -- in digital or programmatic TV -- that the TV networks themselves view it as a necessary part of their marketing mix.