Commentary

3 Factors Key To Targeted TV Success

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.

ad targeting, addressable tv, advertising, commentary, television, tv

2 comments about "3 Factors Key To Targeted TV Success".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, September 7, 2018 at 12:08 p.m.
James, a reality check on some of the facts. First, the average adult has a chance to see or listen to about 350-400 ad messages per day, not counting small space print and digital media ads or out-of-home billboards---not 10,000 brand messages. Moreover, the average adult pays some attention to only about 150 of these ads per day and only a small portion of these "impressions" actually motivate the audience to changing its mind about a brand or taking action. So we are not being engulfed with ads. Also, it is not true that 77% of the TV audience uses another screen whenever a commercial appears. The findings cited are not based on average minute behavior but general behavioral responses. Observational studies indicate that use of a second screen during commercials probably happens about 15-25% of the time---which is quite a significant precentage. Also, Nielsen has reported very small levels of tweeting about programs while they are on the viewer's screen and what there is of this is mostly about the program content, not the ads. Finally, I seriously doubt that many brands will create a whole series of commercials---at $400,000 per crack----to be sent to relatively small segments of "addressable" viewers based on their varying mindsets---particularly when, in many cases, it is not even known who in the household is watching.

Nevertheless, I happen to agree with you about the potential for learning much more than we now know about how consumers respond to ads and how this might be determined by creative use of some of the techniqies you cited. The opportunity, itself, is worthy of consideration, but we don't need to vastly overstate the numbers to make it seem bigger than it really is.
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John Grono from GAP Research, September 7, 2018 at 8:38 p.m.

Well said Ed.

I recall when I moved to an ad agency in the '90s that the 'benchmark' figure (i.e. commonly accepted as 'likely' but never validated or proven) was 3,000 ads per day (not cognisantly processed).

The big change in the past two decades is the internet. As a result TV has shrunk and fragmented. Newspapers and magazines have been hit hard.

So if the 10,000 figure is correct and the 3,000 was correct, does that mean that 'the internet' shovels some 7,000 ads a day. Some days it feels like it! At 'an ad a page' rate it is not implausible.