Advertisers have long struggled to connect TV spend to action. The linear nature of TV viewing and the lack of interactivity have made the marketing transaction one-sided. TVs were labeled “traditional” media and kept distinct from digital sources. That’s why TV was deemed to be both essential to branding and to have no accountability.
That’s about to change. With smart TVs, the television hardware itself makes the jump from traditional to digital media and can be considered like any other connected device in the household.
New technology advances make it possible to connect viewing data from smart TVs—who watches what programs and sees what ads—with digital profiles, including marketers’ first-party data. As a result, marketers can connect TV and digital in ways they couldn’t before, making TV a central part of cross-channel campaigns and creating the comprehensive views of customers necessary to drive business outcomes from marketing.
Reach TV audiences everywhere
For starters, marketers can now identify the consumers who have seen their ads on TV and re-engage with them online, in environments and formats that provide a clear call to action. By looking at reach and frequency of their TV ads, they can use digital media to overcome the frequency imbalance (some TV viewers see an ad dozens of times while others don’t see it at all). By combining digital and viewing profiles, they can identify the networks and programs their best customers watch and adjust their TV spends accordingly.
More importantly, marketers can continue the conversation with TV audiences when they go online. Beyond just retargeting, marketers can apply sequential digital messaging based on the number of TV ads seen by a consumer, or the specific messaging seen. They can target consumers exposed to competitor’s ads with messaging showing the same products at lower prices or with better service.
If they have the ability to connect digital profile data to mobile location data, marketers can use store traffic data to close the loop completely, identifying how a customer’s purchase journey went from initial awareness and exposure on TV to an in-store purchase. With the proper integration of CRM data, retailers can model TV audiences based on the viewing habits of customers participating in loyalty programs, giving marketers another way to adjust their ad mix or network buys.
In practical terms, this means that restaurants, grocers and retailers with brick-and-mortar locations can combine TV, online and location data to build full, closed-loop models of customer behavior and understand how exposure to ads in each channel affects the purchase journey. They can gauge how specific messages affect that journey and identify how their audiences vary by channel. Ideally, they can move from ponderous marketing mix models to complex attribution models that take TV into account.
Impacting real-world behavior
Several advertisers are now applying first-party data to TV and online audiences alike, and the findings are instructive.
One retailer we worked with found that, while consumers who saw both TV and online ads were only marginally more likely to make an online purchase than those who only saw TV ads, they were almost four times more likely to visit a physical store location. Digital exposure also decreased the time to conversion: Consumers who saw a display ad after a TV ad were more than 3x more likely to make a digital purchase within the following hour.
On the research side, we’ve already seen interesting applications from a pre-campaign research standpoint. Political advertisers have had access to voter file data through multiple sources, but lacked the ability to efficiently segment those constituents. With the addition of TV data, these advertisers can identify what news programs their audiences follow (and how often) and message accordingly based on which coverage they’ve seen.
Activating TV audiences digitally will do a lot more than improve advertisers’ returns on their most expensive medium. It will solidify the chain of accountability that businesses increasingly demand and go a long way toward increasing the effectiveness of cross-channel marketing.
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Robert Jones is vice president, research and insights at MiQ, a marketing intelligence company. He is a veteran of the adtech market, previously at Sailthru, Rocket Fuel, NBCUniversal and Lotame.
