Tear down the wall between agency TV and digital teams
Nick Reid, Managing Director of TubeMogul UK, looks at how agencies must adapt to look at video holistically, just like their consumers do.
It is no mystery that consumers are watching video everywhere. Our eyeballs are constantly flitting between screens, watching Britain’s Got Talent one minute and then laughing at a YouTube video sent by a friend the next.
To viewers, video is video regardless if they are watching on a tablet or TV. This makes marketers’ jobs much harder. For the most part, TV and digital planning teams at agencies are separate and measure success very differently.
While TV executives tend to think in terms of cost per ‘Gross Rating Points’ (GRPs) and day-parting strategies when reaching a target audience, digital buyers are more accustomed to sorting through an alphabet of terms that are native to the internet – audience segments, real time bidding, social network sharing rates, cost per completed view, etc.
Ultimately, both teams want the same thing: to reach a target audience accountably in order to drive awareness, loyalty and, fundamentally, get people to buy things – to ‘sell, or else,’ as David Ogilvy famously put it.
We know from working with so many TV and online buying teams that digital video need not detract from or threaten TV spend; video is a complementary medium to TV. The central question is cost per unique target viewer on each medium.
That is why GRPs are such an important metric for digital video advertising. Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) give online video the same accountability as TV by verifying a target audience was reached from a trusted third party.
But to date, there has been a catch: buying digital video on a cost per point basis is a process of trial and error, preventing meaningful budget moves. Once a buy is made, marketers manually optimise to GRP reporting, which results in a lot of waste compared to TV given low accuracy in targeting different demographics.
For our part, TubeMogul endeavoured to change this calculus by creating the first tool modeled on audience data that helps marketers transition from reporting on GRPs to accurately buying them. Called BrandPoint, the tool allows buyers to accurately gauge media costs in real time for different demographics and regions, which is a major step forward for buyers activating within a scatter marketplace.
“BrandPoint represents a seriously exciting new development in the video ad buying space,” says Matt Simpson, managing director of EMEA at Annalect. “Viewers don’t distinguish between screens, we do, and if BrandPoint helps us make that a more seamless connected experience then we are one step closer to attributing ad spend in the most effective way.”
The key here is accountability. Agencies want buys backed by a cost per point guarantee, where the media partner (not the agency) takes on the risk and Nielsen independently verifies the results. In the end, we – along with everyone else in the industry – are judged by an independent standard and like it that way.
In that world, the best technology wins, and so do marketers tired trying to figure out who in a sea of ad tech companies are worth working with.
Many avant-garde agencies are already making the transition to merging their TV and digital teams in some form. According to research from Digiday, almost half (48%) of agencies are currently planning TV and digital video together.
The results benefit TV and digital executives alike. To TV executives, this is a necessity given that consumers are getting harder to reach on traditional television. To digital buyers, TV brings clout and tremendous buying power.
Rob Bochicchio, executive vice president of broadcast investment at Interpublic’s ID Media described the change underway this way recently: “We know from a consumer standpoint that viewers are watching everywhere. We are guiding our clients to have online video be a part of their linear television buys – it’s just another screen.”
Many marketers are finding that digital video is in fact cheaper than TV for certain regions and demographics; for other markets, TV comes out on top. The larger point is that these decisions are determined by market data from a third party, not agency politics or educated guesses (albeit ones informed by decades of experience).
As agencies adapt, they will start to look at video holistically – just like their consumers do.