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Today, convergent TV—linear plus connected TV and over-the-top services—offers the best of everything: large, captivated audiences, high-quality content, an abundance of inventory and digital-like targeting, with precise measurement and attribution. Given the data accessible to advertisers, combined with advances in targeting, TV is the strongest, most scalable and precise medium. It has also established a growing marketplace where all sides of the trade can win.
The cookie’s demise is a good thing for TV
With traditional digital, marketers are accustomed to homing in on precise audiences. But that hasn’t always been the case with TV, which for a long time offered few insights beyond age and gender when it came to demographics.
CTV/OTT and linear now offer sophisticated audience analytics and targeting capabilities. Given that the third-party cookie’s days are numbered, many argue that TV targeting is in a much better position than digital. Due to relationships between ad-tech vendors and digital TV providers, targeting is based on data like IP address and not proxies based on cookies.
Google’s continued delay in phasing out the cookie, as well as Apple’s announcement about App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5, haven’t slowed down the urgency in developing new tracking solutions. For digital advertising, there is no doubt this eventual change will cause massive upheaval, and for many digital ad-tech players, it’s going to mean a significant re-think in how their attribution and planning technologies operate.
For linear and CTV/OTT, targeting based on third-party cookies simply doesn’t exist. Plus, there is nothing we have seen so far in any planned web browser or app that is likely to impact the future ability to measure and prove TV outcomes for advertisers. So while the end of the cookie will impact web-based advertising, it won’t impact the convergent TV ecosystem.
Data connectivity is transforming TV measurement and attribution
Prior to today’s convergent TV landscape, commercials were seen primarily as vehicles for brand awareness, mostly because marketers believed that it was impossible to know who saw an ad, let alone the action they took as a result of it. But as anyone who has seen a Peloton ad during the pandemic now understands, TV is all about closed-loop measurement and attribution. Why? Because real time, deterministic measurement—who saw your ad and how many times—and attribution—the actions those viewers took as a result—are now both possible across all forms of TV.
New technology and data integrations have made it possible to match exposure data to online and offline activity, including sales, website visits, app downloads and foot traffic.
Old-school business practices would have never allowed for this level of flexibility.
Even with traditional digital media, measurement and attribution were approximations; a direct result of the extreme fragmentation of the environment. Convergent TV data, however, is deterministic. Marketers get device-level, second-by-second viewing activity by household, and can apply that data to drive incremental reach across CTV platforms and streaming publishers. They also know who saw an ad, when, on what device, and the action(s) he or she took as a result.
Having this level of granular data tied directly to a household enables precise TV measurement and attribution that not only proves TV’s impact and effectiveness but also informs activations and uncovers audience insights that were not previously possible in a traditional linear universe.
Flexibility and optimization makes TV a scalable performance channel
At the start of the pandemic, marketers weren’t sure what would happen to their TV budgets or even where their audiences would be. In many cases, CTAs and messaging within spots had to change to reflect what was happening in the world. The need to pivot quickly increased the overall demand for flexibility and optimization within convergent TV.
Advertisers leaned on publisher relationships to give them the flexibility needed to swap and optimize placements. This challenging time proved that such changes are possible in an industry that was previously known for long lead times and minimal alterations.
Meeting advertisers’ demands for greater flexibility and optimization comes at an important time as audiences disperse across platforms, and managing TV campaigns holistically becomes more challenging. We’ve all viewed the same ad on streaming platforms multiple times in a given program and ad break, and experienced ads where the creative message was outdated.
Programmatic CTV advertising has proven to be an avenue that advertisers can tap for optimization and real-time adjustments, while deterministic linear and other CTV analytics provide weekly and monthly data. All of this is a huge step forward for TV, where legacy infrastructure and old-school business practices would have never allowed for this level of flexibility.
The convergent TV landscape has all the benefits of digital, plus more. It brings together content, scale, reach, data and targeting, creating a strong marketplace where all sides of the TV ecosystem can not only survive, but thrive.
