Rethinking TV
Partner content
Next time a familiar problem feels stuck in the mud – the tool, the product or the idea in front of you might already hold the answer, if you’re willing to reframe what it’s for.
I wager that sitting very close to you, perhaps even in your hand, is a smartphone. Take a look and consider how parts of this remarkable tool were designed to do some very specific things.
The flash and camera, for example, were placed there to simply brighten dark rooms and take snaps. But by thinking differently about their capabilities, software developers recently unlocked a radically different use, turning these well-known components into a health-screening tool.
When you place your finger over the lens, the flash illuminates your capillaries, allowing the camera to track the subtle colour shifts as blood pumps through them. It then becomes possible to analyse (with clever algorithms) how this transmitted light changes with every heartbeat so the phone can screen for dangerously low blood oxygen levels.
Instruments that essentially help you brighten up a late-night party photo can be used as a medical tool. This kind of sideways thinking reminds me of what Rory Sutherland calls ‘problem reframing’. When you face a challenge, the answer is not always to keep pushing for a better one; it is to change the question or context entirely.
Reframing is useful because it can unlock elegant solutions that traditional logic would dismiss. There was never a rule that limited how a smartphone feature could be used. For a long time, we were simply held back by a deeply embedded habit of seeing a tool as only one thing.
The exact same is true for television
TV’s biggest challenge is its own historic success. Because it has spent decades comfortably cemented at the top of the media plan, most people instinctively view it only as a broad-reach, brand-building channel – the ultimate ‘mass media tool’. This is fair enough, because it is.
But as my old pals at Thinkbox have nicely articulated, there are actually two broad camps of TV: mass and addressable. The ‘mass’ part is what everyone is deeply familiar with and what leaps to mind; it’s where TV has buckets of mental availability.
The addressable part, however, is relatively new and where we as an industry need to think differently; to reframe in our minds how we can use TV to provide a competitive advantage.
So what happens when we do this? Here are three ways TV is already being used by a host of major advertisers in brilliant new and useful ways, all of which help solve some thorny modern marketing challenges. But it’s the same screen, just reframed.
1) Test and learn
TV is not supposed to be a test-and-learn research tool. You commission the research, then you make the ad – not the other way round. But an automotive brand we have worked with used a single campaign to test several targeting approaches side by side: first-party data, Experian Mosaic segments, and auto-intender data, among others. It’s a more refined and sophisticated process that showed how first-party data, in particular, can deliver a huge advantage, delivering three times the visit rate of the others.
A charity we tracked ran the same logic on creative rather than targeting, testing a range of executions live. The version with higher emotional stakes and a more urgent call to action drove three times the response of its nearest rival. In both cases, the campaign itself became the research.
2) Low-funnel activation
TV is not supposed to be a performance channel. It builds brands over months, not clicks over days – or so the thinking goes.
We tracked an investment app brand running a VOD-only campaign aimed at ABC1 adults and watched as it generated 26,000 incremental web visits and 9,000 app installs: figures more associated with search and social than with a 30-second spot.
An online retailer, meanwhile, pushed this further by targeting women aged 25 and over in selected regions, and saw 274,000 incremental visits and 10,000 purchases inside a short window.
3) First-party data
TV is not supposed to be personal or hyper-targeted. It is the mass medium, built to speak to everyone in roughly the same voice. But a specialist retailer has happily built a campaign on its own customer data, driving 33,000 incremental website visits and 2,000 purchases as a result.
A travel business pushed the idea further still, targeting existing customers and high-value lookalikes on a high-consideration product: it recorded a 33% uplift against a control group and a tenfold return on ad spend.
TV didn’t need to become an entirely different tool to do this. It needed the industry to ask it different questions and to begin thinking in new ways. That’s worth remembering next time a familiar problem feels stuck in the mud – the tool, or the product or idea in front of you might already hold the answer, if you’re willing to reframe what it’s for.
In fact, once you see this kind of thinking, you begin to spot it more often, usually in moments of mild genius – as I did watching a golfing partner use a putter to get out of the sand bunker.
“Jammy swine”, I thought, but I was silently in awe – his advantage wasn’t a harder swing with the traditional club. It was being willing to creatively rethink the shot.
Which raises the question: what else might be worth rethinking?
Matt Hill is research director, Sky Media