The eyes have it: target eyeballs, not devices

Following the Connected Consumer Conference 2015, VisualDNA’s Jon Hewson looks at how brands can turbocharge their video advertising.

New technologies and patterns of media consumption should be making it easier for advertisers to reach their target audiences. Thanks to smart devices and mobile data, consumers can watch compelling content practically wherever they are and at any time.

Although mass TV audiences are continuing to fragment across multiple digital channels, people are watching more TV and video content than ever. And the (theoretical) ability to understand what each individual is watching – and in what context – means that advertisers can segment more accurately.

The key challenge is to follow consumers across all the different screens they own or use, and to make sure you can serve the right ad to the right person at the right time.

Today, there is a degree of pessimism in the industry: concerns about click fraud, non-human traffic, diverse definitions of viewability and the challenges of walled gardens mean that there is not enough premium video inventory out there for advertisers. These concerns are certainly real, but this is a creative industry with a strong track-record of solving tricky challenges.

Rather than sitting around grumbling about how hard it is, we should all be actively striving for common audience metrics, robust measures against fraud, and clear agreement on exactly what constitutes viewability. This will also mean breaking down the present silos – TV, digital, press – and understanding that we need to think about eyeballs not devices.

Currently, 57p in the advertising pound is spent on TV, but it’s not hitting 57 percent of the total available eyeballs. This highlights an unmet need: advertisers have always loved the high impact and reach of TV advertising, and they are eager to replicate their past successes in today’s multi-screen, time-shifting, on-demand world.

We should be confident that the technology will catch up and allow advertisers to follow consumers across multiple connected screens. This will require big publishers to come up with innovative ways to serve ads to the same eyeballs wherever they may be, and to invest in smart data to link those eyeballs across the different screens to understand the person behind the devices.

Smart data will enable the delivery of the right creative messages to the right people at the right moment, taking into account all the context around when and how they are consuming video content. CMOs are hungry for this capability, which will give them back the mass reach and engagement that are steadily being eroded as traditional TV audiences fragment.

Right now, major UK publishers – and, in particular, the TV companies – seem to lack the desire to innovate, choosing to see the emerging enabling technologies as a threat rather than an opportunity to turbocharge TV. Their high-quality content is precisely what consumers want, and they need to make it more readily available.

In parallel, advertisers need to think more creatively about how they reach consumers on different screens, and about how they build in clever contextual features that recognise who each consumer is and what they are doing. For example, rather than just shoehorning TV ads into mobile video, smart advertisers are dreaming up contextual apps that appeal to screen-hopping viewers and build brand engagement that persists long after the video is watched.

The key point to take away is that all this new technology will just be an enabler: advertising will remain a creative business. Collectively, we need to stop getting hung up on technology and be positive about what it will allow us to do. This also means putting ideas, not channels, first.

Instead of asking, “What can we do on Twitter?”, we should be thinking, “What ideas do we have for capturing our target audience’s imagination and building an emotional connection with them?” A great example was John Lewis’s Christmas 2014 ‘Monty the Penguin’ campaign: a simple but powerful idea that was then adapted to fit the different requirements and demands of dozens of different channels.

Using smart, contextual data to provide insight into the people behind the screens, major publishers can boost their advertising revenues and give brands what they are eager to buy: the opportunity to deliver targeted, compelling messages that are appropriate for each viewer and sensitive to the context in which they are viewing the ad.

Ultimately, that will mean greater engagement, better ROI for the brands and higher ad revenues for the publishers.

Jon Hewson is vice president of global advertising at consumer insights and analysis company VisualDNA