• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 7, 2016

Conquesting -- the act of brands running digital advertising, such as paid search, during the same time that competitors’ television advertisements run -- could become this year’s big Super Bowl strategy for those that lack million-dollar television budgets.

Brands would bid against competitors’ keywords in paid-search campaigns -- especially on mobile as more television viewers rely on smaller screens to augment their experience by pulling up player stats and sports scores.

This data-driven marketing approach is not entirely new. It exists in a variety of forms, but the advertising industry has never really embraced conquesting between television and digital advertising, because publishers typically try to protect their brands against this type of competition, says Ashwin Navin, CEO at Samba TV, a media and analytics firm that supports the connection between television and digital media.

With a treasure trove of data, Samba TV has been working with Citigroup, the company’s consumer credit card business, with a focus on building the brand and focusing on product awareness. The company is finding a way to combine television and digital media, not specially in conquesting, but addressability and programmatic.

Samba’s Sync and Retarget managed to identify when a Citigroup ad ran on television and programmatically triggered digital buys within moments of when it ran on TV.

Christine DiLandro, SVP, head of media and integrating marketing at Citigroup, explains in a video that when combining television with digital it improves the odds that the consumers get the message. “It had the highest lift in awareness among upper funnel strategies,” she explains.  

An increasing number of brands such as Home Depot run television spots with digital media such as paid-search advertisements, or trigger paid search advertisements against their competitor’s television spots.

“We sold our first conquesting ad in beta about a year ago, and now we see more than 200 brands using the strategy,” Navin says.

Samba TV now offers data that allows brands to conquest, plan their digital strategies around their competitors’ television campaigns. Marketers want to know after the spots run whether there’s a heightened level of digital activity for their products whether in increase in search queries or mobile app installs and visits.

Until now marketers had to correlate disparate sets of activity and use two different mathematical models to come to a conclusion by looking to see whether search traffic jumped. Many times the broadcast isn’t live, but rather time shifted, tapped to view at a later time.

The analytics platform compares ad exposer from one channel to the next both for live and time shifted viewing, with Web site visitations and product sales.