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DWA's Sarah Wilson on Using Advanced TV to Improve the Consumer Experience and Track ROI

How to use digital audience data and cutting-edge technology to transform your 2018 television buys

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Sarah Wilson courtesy of DWA

 

The latter half of 2017 saw a dramatic uptick in the number of brands interested in testing new television formats such as connected TV and addressable TV. So says Sarah Wilson, an associate media director at DWA, a media agency with deep expertise in working with technology clients. Consumers are increasingly adopting skinny bundles, abandoning cable, picking up streaming video devices, and viewing video on social media platforms. "These days, it's easy to feel like the audience you are going after is a moving target," she says.

Brand clients, Wilson argues, must be proactive in adding advanced TV to their 2018 television plan to reach increasingly elusive audiences on a wide variety of devices. "Smart marketers understand that broad awareness often isn't enough anymore," she says. "Connecting long-form content consumption on any device back to actual sales through cross-device technology and analytics is the new holy grail of television advertising, and that's where advanced TV can really help."

Here, Wilson discusses the rapid rise of advanced TV and how advertisers can leverage it to improve the consumer experience.

 

Q. Not every marketer is familiar with the concept of advanced TV. What is it, and why is DWA recommending that marketers add advanced TV to their 2018 media plans?

Advanced TV is TV advertising that is sold on an impression basis. It is executed using software automation and advanced audience data to create value for both the buy and sell sides of the transaction. Advanced TV brings the granularity of digital, for both targeting and reporting, to a high-impact format that is typically used solely as a broad-reaching tactic.

Advanced TV can be activated across three core buying methods:

  • Addressable TV. Traditional TV ads targeted on a one-to-one basis to specific households that are selected based on predefined attributes.
  • Connected TV. Real-time buying of live TV ads on internet-enabled, OTT devices or smart TV applications, coupled with first- or third-party data to refine audiences.
  • Programmatic Linear TV. Automated traditional linear TV buying by finding programming that over-indexes against a defined target audience and transacting a TV schedule via programmatic platforms that only buy against that program selection.

Now that both the targeting and scale exist to reach a specific audience, advanced TV can be treated as another core component in an advertiser's media mix to raise awareness and drive demand within their target audiences. Even better, with advances in cross-device measurement and identity management, marketers can now frequency cap across advanced TV campaigns and improve the experience for the viewer watching the ads.

 

Q. How well can advanced TV deliver a targeted audience against a linear television buy?

Advanced TV requires powerful identity and data management technology to be successful. As an example, DWA worked with software provider dataxu on behalf of our brand client to identify a digital audience of small and midsize business owners, and then overlay that audience with TV viewership data. We used these audience insights to create a linear TV plan to include high-indexing TV networks, dayparts, and programs by geography. We then partnered with dataxu and used its TouchPoint demand-side platform and OneView technology to execute the plan programmatically through key linear supply.

We measured digital engagement post-buy to ensure that awareness had been generated among the client's targeted audience. The client was able to achieve 11 times greater digital engagement through programmatic linear TV with DWA and dataxu than through traditional TV buys it had run previously.

 

Q. What types of metrics should marketers use to measure the success of advanced TV initiatives?

The granularity of advanced TV reporting offers marketers more effective and meaningful measurement of TV campaigns. With this granular reporting, marketers should be sure to evaluate diagnostic reach and delivery metrics such as reach, frequency, CPM, cost per household, completion rate, cost-per completed view, and daypart and programming to help prove success. These metrics enable marketers to be more certain that they did effectively reach their audiences and also gain insights into how viewers engaged with the messaging to improve the customer experience.

In addition to reach and delivery metrics, marketers should define a framework for measuring impact on the lower funnel, if applicable to their campaign. This will enable marketers to prove attribution on TV spend. This can be accomplished by comparing control groups against exposed audiences to measure overall lift and also to determine optimal frequency against conversions.

 

Q. What would you say to reassure marketers who feel that the CPMs for advanced TV or connected TV are expensive?

While CPMs are higher for advanced TV than display or digital video, the barrier to entry for testing advanced TV tactics is still within reach for advertisers with modest budgets. Defining a measurement framework to prove performance easily validates continuing an investment, or scaling it.

The premium on a CPM as compared to display can also be justified by the environment the ad is served in: premium, high-impact format that is 100 percent viewable, with average video completion rates above 90 percent. There is also a certain prestige that comes with a TV spot — it gives a halo effect of sophistication that can aid in building brand recall and favorability.

Advanced TV is not remnant inventory; it offers marketers the ability to align with premium dayparts within primetime, news, etc., and not just late night. Marketers can also include a blacklist to further refine where messaging shows up and avoid associations with questionable programming. In the end, you get what you pay for.

 

Caitlin Cerra (@CaitCerra) is the marketing communications specialist at dataxu. You can email her at ccerra@dataxu.com.

 


 

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