Until now, brands and agencies have largely relied on social listening tools to measure social response to TV ads. But iSpot.tv, a real-time TV ad metrics platform, has just made it easier for stakeholders to correlate digital activity to the airing of national TV commercials. iSpot.tv’s platform now allows customers to monitor social actions, search activity and online video views associated with TV spots across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! The data will be particularly valuable to media buyers, who will be able to decide on where to allocate resources based on which networks and shows are most likely to generate a digital response for particular product categories.
With products like iSpot.tv social marketers are already reaping the rewards: “Real-time data surrounding TV advertising is a huge development for the entire advertising industry, ” said Bob Ivins, chief data officer of Mindshare, a global media agency and division of WPP. “This not only enables a more optimized approach to reaching consumers, it provides a new way to help clients gain competitive advantage on the TV screen and digitally.”
To date, the iSpot.tv platform measures, and has a database of, 40,000 campaigns running on 80 TV networks and representing 5,000 brands across 160 industries. In November, iSpot.tv captured 191 million explicit digital actions surrounding TV ads, including 158 million online views of TV ads, over 30 million searches and nearly 4 million social actions.
As these numbers become more robust, brands will be able to justify putting more money towards expensive and creative commercials – and we will likely see more cats; media buyers will begin targeting consumers on more niche TV networks – and more niche networks will begin to pop up.