For years, marketers have heard about the end of TV’s modern golden era and its impact on advertising. It’s time to separate rumor from fact.
Marketers continue to rely on TV as one of the best ways to reach consumers broadly for their products and services. Nielsen says there are currently 119 million TV homes in the U.S., up a million from the previous year, and a record 500 TV shows were scripted in 2017.
But while TV continues to be powerful, attention on other screens has grown quickly and new entertainment platforms continue to fragment audiences. According to eMarketer, the average U.S. adult today spends 215 minutes per day with mobile, while TV accounts for 230 minutes of viewing time, and mobile viewing time will top TV in 2019.
While these shifts make a marketer’s job more challenging than ever, they also create opportunities to create greater impact by leveraging mobile and TV together. Here’s how:
1. Use the right media mix to reinforce messaging with hard-to-reach audiences
Fragmented audiences and shifting viewing habits make it hard to reach everyone in one place. The best way to grab attention these days is to use TV as part of a strong and efficient media mix.
Research proves that adding Facebook advertising is efficient at creating incremental reach, particularly among audiences of light TV watchers. Of people in the U.S. on Facebook, a light TV watcher is, on average, 27 years old. In a recent study where Facebook complemented a TV campaign, 15 percent of light TV viewers were reached by Facebook only—providing a 23 percent incremental reach to TV, per Nielsen Total Ad Ratings on Facebook 2017.
Facebook is also a powerful platform to prime people before they see your TV ads, or to remind them after that they’ve watched your TV ads.
2. Optimize video for the different ways people watch
People watch video anywhere and everywhere these days—kicking back on the sofa at home, lounging in a coffee shop, and even at work.
Building mobile-optimized video assets that complement the various ways people watch video has proven to be more successful at driving brand impact than, for example, running a commercial on Facebook that was originally built for TV. Advertisers that optimize their video can drive higher brand awareness and message association for their campaigns.
At Facebook, we conducted an analysis of over 100 U.S. film campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network between 2015 to 2017, ranging from major releases to smaller, limited-release films. We found that mobile-optimized creative drove a 2X lift in definite intent over non-mobile optimized creative. Additionally, our global studies found that mobile-optimized video had a 27 percent higher success rate in lifting brand awareness over TV commercials on Facebook, and a 23 percent higher success rate in lifting message association.
Building video creative for mobile viewing doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated. We’ve seen marketers re-edit and re-purpose existing long-form TV video ads into short-form ads for mobile, and these ads ended up being watched 20 percent longer on average and performing about six points better in ad recall when run in Facebook’s News Feed than on TV.
3. Measure business goals across every channel, at every stage
Today’s fragmented media consumption is the bane of every marketer’s existence and measuring across these multiple channels makes it nearly impossible to understand a consumer’s behavior.
Overall, return on ad spend is more important than ever. But, to date, there’s no single common denominator for measurement. As a result, most media measurement happens in silos. The most-used metrics tend to be gross rating point (GRP) to measure TV, clickthrough rate to measure desktop, or cost per acquisition to measure apps.
There are a number of tools you can use to close the loop and measure across channels. For example, Facebook offers Target Rating Point, which gives marketers the ability to plan and buy Nielsen-verified TRPs on Facebook. The TRP provides the ability to extend TV campaigns and make it easier to reach people where they are spending their time. There’s also the Nielsen Total Ad Ratings, which show reach across TV and Facebook, the overlap, and ways to optimize campaigns to reach your audiences more effectively and efficiently.
For cross-platform adopters looking for solutions that explicitly allow you to target those gaps between TV and digital, Facebook offers targeting capabilities that find people based on their TV viewing habits. Reaching light TV viewers on Facebook lets you round out your plan and ensure full coverage.
The bottom line?
This isn’t a marketing or media revolution. It’s simply part of a modern evolution. While there will always be rumblings and rumors to keep marketers awake at night, knowing how to be flexible and open to new ways of improving the efficiency of your media campaigns will not only ensure that you’re staying ahead of the curve, but also that you’re broadly reaching more audiences and getting the optimal return on your ad spend.
**
Bob Gruters is a group leader on Facebook’s Global Marketing Solutions U.S. team. He leads several talented teams that manage and grow the entertainment and technology/telco verticals.
