Seamlessly extending TV campaigns online
Matt Whelan, digital strategy director at The Specialist Works, explains how it is now possible to agnostically shift budget between online and offline AV channels
Let’s clear something up immediately: television is far from a dead or fragmented medium. Between conversations about The Great British Bake Off, Game of Thrones or Love Island it should be evident that a TV show still has incredible power to captivate not only a viewer, but most of the population simultaneously, and the brands that align themselves with that show receive strong uplifts in engagement and recall.
There’s also far less stigma surrounding AV consumption – we’re in the age of binge-watching, and there is no shame (well, little shame at least) in confessing you spent the weekend consuming hours of your latest boxed set or Netflix release.
AV content is more popular than ever and online consumption is continuously rising. Just over 20% of a person’s daily video content is online in one form or another, and the younger you are, the higher that number. Marketers have the opportunity to embrace the power of AV advertising with broader delivery mechanisms and exciting new targeting opportunities. And doing it works.
According to Binet and Field, when you combine online video with your TV campaigns the amount of ‘very big’ business effects rises from 33% (for just TV) to 54%. That’s a big jump – but it’s not one that’s instantly available from simply activating both media channels in an isolated fashion, and it can be tricky to integrate campaigns that have such fundamentally different underlying delivery mechanics.
TV and online video must, however, be used and optimised in tandem to achieve the available payback.
Everyone has seen online AV done badly. Those auto-playing videos embedded in a written article are intrusive and can actually be a negative experience for the viewer, especially on mobile. Advertisers who utilise these formats will know their poor engagement rates, due to delivery to an audience who aren’t invested enough in the content to give their whole attention to the ad.
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In order for online video delivery to become a seamless extension of TV the experiences need to be comparable, and that’s clearly not ever going to be the case for a lot of the available online inventory. TV ads have cut-through and a level of acceptability to the viewer.
If a TV viewer is watching a programme, they’re likely already paying fairly undivided attention, and are prepared for adverts as a part of the process. To replicate this online we need to utilise pre/mid-roll and in-stream inventory, not banners that happen to contain auto-playing video ad units.
We also need to correctly match the AV to the content or audience in an acceptable way. I’m prepared to watch a short Gillette ad before I view the highlights of my football team’s last match online.
I’m unlikely to be prepared to watch an ad to view a three second video of a cat playing a piano, even if the ad is for Whiskas. So the value, or “premium” nature, of content also needs to be taken into account.
To achieve integration, the methodology of TV reporting and planning also has to be applied. The most common approach to adding online channels to an AV mix seems to be “shall we spend 10% of our budget online, and see how it does?”, which isn’t a particularly robust data-driven approach. And then the most common method of evaluation – against other online media – is equally unhelpful in the formulation of an integrated strategy.
For an initial test with no historic data, plan your integrated budget in the same way you’d plan your TV. Look at the target audience and understand the incremental reach online activity adds.
Robustly plan your whole budget for TV and then multiple scenarios where you assign different weighting to different pieces of online activity. Find the optimal delivery scenario and run with that until you have enough performance data to make optimisation decisions.
When it comes to evaluating performance, whether you’re deploying skippable pre-roll ads on YouTube, in-feed videos on Facebook and Twitter, or in-programme adverts via Broadcaster VOD, the purpose of the activity should remain the same as your TV campaign. In most cases that means achieving impactful reach to an audience at scale in order to drive them into your purchase funnel.
So stop trying to compare AV results to lower-funnel activity such as paid search. A video will never receive the click-through and conversion rate of a search result ad, regardless of what screen it’s viewed on, because a viewer isn’t (usually) in such a “transactional” mindset as a searcher.
TV response is trackable, and there are a number of platforms on the market designed to attribute online response to TV ads, so attribute online AV response in a similar way, rather than just looking at your web analytics.
At TSW we’ve built an integration between our TV measurement platform and our DSP to ensure that attribution is completely aligned, and visits and sales are de-duped by source in a unified way. Crucially doing this allows you to achieve completely “screen-neutral” optimisation.
To be a truly seamless online expansion you need this agnostic optimisation capability. You should be able to understand the effectiveness of each AV Rating purchased in relation to each other and weight your spend in accordance with that. If you’re not able to use comparable metrics to have conversations about whether you spend more on Vice.com or Dave you’re not working in an integrated way.