• by James Shears , September 6, 2018

The average American is exposed to roughly 10,000 brand messages, per AMA, a day. With so many ads bombarding consumers, many advertisers are turning to the internet rather than TV to ensure their target audience is reached.

Rapidly evolving technology has changed this dynamic and allowed advertisers to generate similar return on investment (ROI) on TV.

Despite the constant, millennial-focused talk of television becoming a media relic, all data points to the fact that TV still dominates. It remains a valuable and essential asset for advertisers to pursue.

Though addressable TV has been around since the early part of this decade, it’s still relatively new to the wider advertising community. Ensuring that advertisers are capitalizing on these advantages requires the ability to use available data, a keen eye for creative and consistently monitoring engagement to evaluate next steps for a campaign.

Data Matters

By collecting both viewership data and online engagement information, advertisers can better understand their successes and failures. Lack of significant data is also telling: Bad creative will deter advertisers from being able to measure if they’ve selected the right audience.

In this case, it’s best to recalibrate and consider what the collected information is telling them about their content.

Data can also reveal some surprising facts. An advertiser may think their content is aimed at a specific audience, but in reality, it may be resonating with an unexpected demographic. Sometimes this is a welcome mistake, but other times it can be frustrating for a business to miss the mark. Being aware of a target audience’s viewing behaviors is crucial to determining ad placement and reaching the right consumers.

Addressable advertising platforms help advertisers better understand their audiences as they are able to view interests, demographics and preferences down to the household level.

Creative Matters

Advertisers need to know how to leverage such information to create content that resonates with their target audience. Ultimately, the success of an ad’s placement won’t matter if the content fails to connect with the audience—even for a prime-time slot. Consumers are less inclined to take action based on an ad when the creative isn’t interesting to them.

Appealing to an audience’s ethos through humor, nostalgia or heartwarming narratives are most effective. For example, AT&T and Errol Morris digitally aged fatal crash victims to show what their lives could have been like in their “It Can Wait” campaign.

Advertisers might also consider creating something truly off-the-wall that forces viewers to pay attention, like the jarring content in Old Spice’s signature 2010 commercial.

With addressable, advertisers can use the information obtained through the platform to create more relevant ads for their target audience. Then, advertisers reap the benefits in the form of increased engagement and conversion to sales.

Engagement Matters

Once the creative is established, how can advertisers measure audience engagement? TV advertisers can turn to another source to measure target audience engagement: the internet.

One of the most useful strategies an advertiser can adopt is leveraging television with social media. Given that 77% of TV users use another device at the same time, per Honigman Media findings, advertisers need to maximize their reach. Especially since in 2017, of the top 10 most tweeted topics, 100% were televised cultural events.

The conversations people have online while watching TV are incredibly important and monitoring these conversations allows advertisers to understand their audience in more detail. Companies can even direct social interactions by incorporating a hashtag into their televised spot.

Watching for other behaviors online is a great way to track audience engagement. Did people go online and search for something specific? What keywords are being used in relation to the brand since the ad aired? These insights allow advertisers to make more data-driven and informed decisions about future content, improving the overall impact of their ads in terms of ROI.

The more forward-thinking an advertiser’s approach is, the less likely they will get left behind as better technologies become available for addressable content.