Cross-Platform Ad Campaigns Add Millions To Audience Reach
- by Wayne Friedman , May 21, 2015
Cross-platform advertising on both TV and Internet screens continues to drive incremental reach upward. In studies of the effectiveness of some 12 campaigns, Nielsen says average incremental reach of adults 18-49 was boosted by 10.4% by adding online to TV.
In total, an average of 99 million 18-49 viewers were reached with the campaigns, with online adding an additional 10 million people.
Some 49% of the reach came from TV only; 7.7% from online-only, and 17.9% combined. Total TV reach, including some of the combined results, gave a TV a 67% reach; total online reach was 25.6%.
Nielsen says the 12 campaigns include advertisers in food, electronics, entertainment, financial and auto, which are looking to reach adults between 18-49 years old. The 12 campaigns -- served at least 1 billion television exposures and 100 million to 500 million online impressions -- reached almost 75% of the audience they sought, adults 18-49.
A recent Nielsen survey says that 62% of North Americans now use a second screen to browse the Internet while watching TV-video programming, and that 39% say they keep up with TV shows by using social media -- for everything from plot twists to product placements.
Wayne, to be fair, if you add any media platform to TV---whether it be radio, magazines or digital---you will add reach. So such findings are hardly earth shaking. Indeed, the audience "duplication" rates shown in some of these TV plus digital tabulations are surprisingly high while the reach increment is surprisingly low----especially in short time frames like one week. Also to be considered is whether the digital "audience" can see the ad, the relative cost of the incremental reach, the added value of the inherent audience duplication or reinforcement, and where you are losing frequency in the TV audience base---to pay for the added reach from a digital buy. It's a much more complicated issue and reach tallies, like Nielsen is describing, cover only one part of the equation.
Digital can be a strong medium. However, if one wants to tout digital's strong performance, these examples from Nielsen have done the opposite. The numbers cited in the article suggest TV is the workhorse and digital's audience is highly duplicated. If 25.6% of the target is being reached by digital, but only 7.7% of the target is being exclusively reached by digital, this is evidence that digital is not providing much unique audience to the mix. It suggests that advertisers can reach the majority of digital audiences without actually buying the digital properties they invested in. Why should the advertisers spend money a second time on digital if the advertiser has already reached those same consumers by advertising on TV? These examples from Nielsen are not showcasing that digital helps build incremental reach, but rather the examples demonstrate that digital is providing the advertiser with frequency.
Correct Craig.