We all know and love the sales funnel. What a simple metaphor to describe a customer journey: start at the top with awareness and finish at the bottom with sales.
Each customer
journey through the funnel yields important information about brand interaction, and each media platform throws off distinct information that supports its role in the eventual sale.
For
decades, TV has lived at the top of the funnel. With nearly ubiquitous U.S. penetration and a 50-inch screen to generate awareness for brand messaging, its predictable and proven programming and
advertising formats made it arguably the easiest medium to purchase.
For as many decades, Americans have been sampled by third-party companies to get an understanding of their demographics and
certain declared behaviors. This information was tied to the programming they viewed — and, with it, audience targeting became a standard practice.
As digital advertising in all its
forms has grown, so has the need to capture as much data about consumers as possible, leading to a meteoric rise in the use of data management platforms and customer relationship management
systems.
One thing hasn’t changed in all these years of technology and advertising platform growth: Only advertisers get to see the aggregated sales numbers at the bottom of the
funnel — and, with it, information that informs their understanding of who is buying their products and how often.
Historically, this information has been used for below-the-line
advertising tactics such as direct mail but not until now has it been used for television advertising. We are entering the stage where anonymous data-matching techniques are improving enough
that an individual’s television-viewing behavior can be directly matched to his or her purchase information.
This development will have a dramatic impact on how television advertising is
bought and sold. In essence, advertisers will be able to look up from the bottom of the funnel, through the sales data, and see who was exposed to their message and the respective purchases they made
– versus those who were unexposed to their message and the purchases they made.
With anonymous direct-matching capabilities, advertisers will be able to understand the relationship of
awareness and attribution (top and bottom of the funnel metrics) that only TV can deliver. Additionally, with more and more advertisers using data management platforms, advertisers will be able to
append additional behavioral information about their customers. This will further inform their planning and buying activities and influence their creative messaging strategies.
So if
television now has the ability to show which viewers are prospects and which are existing customers, and advertisers can plan their communication strategies accordingly, I would argue that it is time
to retire the sales “funnel” as the sole metaphor for a marketer’s audience engagement tactics and replace it with the “hourglass.” Why? because an hourglass is an
actionable funnel, and with today’s dynamic marketplace being driven by actionable data, an advertiser’s relationship with a customer does not end when a consumer makes a purchase. It
begins.
As consumers flow back and forth within the two funnels of the hourglass, black-and-white media metrics such as gross rating points and cost-per-thousand impressions will be colored by
the reaction of the audiences as measured by their purchasing behaviors — also known as return on ad spend.
The clarity to define which target audience is responding will help
advertisers answer the crucial question confronting TV today: “How do I know my TV advertising is working?”
“Hourglass marketing” and television’s newfound
ability to measure awareness and attribution will answer this question — with the ultimate winner being the audience.