• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 11, 2016

To illustrate how t-shirt and activewear (including undies) marketer Gildan leveraged programmatic TV, Steve Parker Jr. showed a spot that got right to the point, literally. The spot, which showed a cornball magician poised to poke sharp-pointed swords into woman volunteer in a magic box. The woman asked the magician to wait while she shimmied out of her Gildan t-shirt, presumably to save it from having the magician’s swords tear holes in it. She then said, “Okay, go ahead.”

It was a great sight gag, but the real magic of the spot was in the way Parker’s Charleston-based agency, Levelwing, executed the programmatic targeting behind it.

The spot, which was one of five spots Parker showed to illustrate the creative component of
programmatic TV, made the point in a visceral way. Behind the scenes, Parker’s media team was leveraging a “cost-per-viewed-minute” metric to evaluate its performance.

“Interestingly,” he said, the programmatic TV spots outperformed digital video “in this regard.”

What was most interesting to me, is the growing interest in time-spent metrics for measuring the engagement of consumers to video advertising, whether it’s on TV, digital or anywhere else.

The presentation gave new meaning to the concept of TRPs, or target rating points. Maybe they should be changed to TTVAMRPs (targets that viewed a minute rating points).