Q&A: How we reached online users based on their TV viewing

This week Specific Media launch TV Audience Segments – a new targeting tool that allows advertisers to accurately reach online users based on their TV viewing. Specific’s Gavin Johnson tells Newsline why the project – which fuses data from BARB and Nielsen – means big things for advertisers.

Can you set the scene and tell us what’s going on in the market that would require the launch of something like TV Audience Segments?

As an industry we have never been able to confidently join the dots between who we reach with our TV budget and online campaigns.

The challenge is this: the relationship, or overlap, between people’s TV viewing habits and online media consumption, for me, is like gravity; we know it’s there but it is incredibly difficult to measure, quantify or, thinking back to my GCSEs, understand.

In essence we have no real idea about whether the person we are reaching through our online campaign has already seen the ad on TV, which to me doesn’t feel right; it sounds inefficient, and we can see that clients’ ad campaigns are not connected between the millions spent on telly and millions spent online.

Specific Media’s TV Audience Segments [TVAS] allows advertisers to accurately target online users based on their TV exposure and habits. By fusing data from the most trusted industry sources, Nielsen and BARB, we can bridge the gap between TV and online.

Can you tell us what that means for advertisers?

The solution provides flexibility for advertisers. Two of our initial partners, Virgin Holidays and King.com, have each utilised this tool in different ways to extend and compliment their TV campaigns.

This includes being able to accurately target the elusive, yet highly valuable ‘light’ TV viewers from within target audiences – if they’ve not been exposed to a TV ad, they can instead be reached with online video. Advertisers can also manage a campaign’s ad frequency to users across both TV and online – driving efficiencies by not over or under-exposing segments of the audience.

By understanding a user’s TV habits, you can also determine ad exposure and thus serve sequential or complimentary video or display ads online. We’ve already begun planning campaigns with this in mind. For example, the tool also allows advertisers to reach non-commercial TV audiences [i.e. BBC viewers], so targeting heavy viewers of BBC1’s Match of the Day when they are online is now a possibility.

So how do you view the current state of online advertising?

We need to shift from thinking about digital solutions and start to think again about marketing solutions to address inefficiencies in advertising.

To paint a picture of what these inefficiencies actually look like, Nielsen in the US measured the distribution of impressions by TV viewing frequency across over 100 online campaigns. On average only 18% of traditional online campaign impressions were delivered to light/non TV viewers.

Compare that to campaigns using TVAS, and we see a huge uplift in the proportion of impressions delivered to light to non TV viewers – 75% to light-to-non TV viewers – that’s over four times as efficient if your goal is to target this hard to reach, highly valuable group.

So, with a traditional online campaign two-thirds of your audience are more than likely to have seen your ad on TV already. Using TVAS up to three-quarters probably haven’t…just think about how powerful that is.

We are all well aware of how much online is thriving – over £3 billion was invested into online advertising in H1 2013 alone. Yet we still face many challenges as an industry to create growth.

I’d argue that there has been a bit of online navel-gazing going on; we need to look more towards offline behaviour of consumers, in this case TV viewing, to better understand and serve them as an all-round consumer, not just an online ‘user’.

Agencies and advertisers are increasingly moving towards this alignment with TV/Digital teams combining, but ultimately, without standardised metrics across all mediums, we’ll struggle to see things clearly.

And what about the current state of audience data and measurement, for TV and online?

Both TV and online have superb data and measurement services, and each has acted strongly in its own field for years now. But the time has come to make them hold hands to unify the measurement in order to give us a better view of how the overall media-mix performs, rather than use silos of information that cannot be compared.

Nielsen and comScore have made great strides by providing a robust, comparable metric for online in the form of the digital GRP. Nielsen’s Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings report (XCR) is particularly exciting in this space as for the first time it is giving advertisers true visibility into how digital and TV are working together.

Can you tell us more about the development process of TV Audience Segments?

Advertisers require the most robust solution to have the confidence to adopt new technology; therefore we knew our strengths as a data and technology company would be instrumental in defining the product. Our tech, product and business intelligence teams have worked with Nielsen and BARB for 15 months to perfect the methodology.

What was imperative was that the methodology was built on fusing panel data sets in order to model the audiences. We then agreed an auditing process that continually tests our models to make sure they are approved for use. Then came a raft of training for our team who are taking TVAS to market and we were fortunate to have Nielsen and BARB be really hands-on in getting us ready for launching the solution.

We’d seen our colleagues in the US have huge success with the launch of TV Audience Segments, with dozens of advertisers coming on board in the first 12 months alone, which gave us an indication of the huge potential for a similar solution in the UK.

Gavin Johnson is VP of sales at Specific Media.