TV advertising has traditionally provided advertisers with sales lift studies for ROI purposes, but these reports often take a long time to turn around (usually 8 to 12 weeks) and may not give the full story around the consumer journey. You know the demographics you’re buying or—in today’s parlance—you know about the audience you’re buying. But actually determining whether the ad had the intended effect at the cash register? That’s been a little bit harder.
The good news: TV remains the most effective way to advertising, delivering strong returns, especially to brands that are looking to increase awareness and build their equity with consumers. On top of that, TV has become increasingly more efficient, especially when campaigns are built around a multiplatform or multiscreen strategy.
The better news: TV ads are now much more effective in gauging performance because they’re able to close the loop on the customer journey and identify the moments that lead to actual purchase. The secret weapon that empowers this? Footfall attribution.
The next step to TV success
As we pointed out in our previous column, TV today is becoming data-driven. Data sets are being used instead of standard age/sex demographics identify actual audiences for linear TV buys. And more advanced connected TV and addressable TV options enhance the ability of advertisers to reach qualified households.
But buying audiences is really only half the story. The real power of data is its ability to connect TV ad exposure to real-world results. And for many advertisers, that will take the form of using footfall attribution—using location data to see the behavior and movement of people exposed to an ad. This allows advertisers to understand if their audiences have acted by visiting a store, which can then be linked to an actual sale. It all answers the question that every advertiser asks: Is my campaign working?
And once that question is answered, brands can start to use this information to take decisive steps. And those are going to fall into two categories—real-time optimization and post-campaign ROI (aka visit uplift).
Campaign optimization
Once brands understand how TV ads are performing, they can make in-flight changes to increase campaign efficiency. Timing is particularly crucial. For instance, knowing that traffic to a pancake restaurant peaks on Saturday and Sunday mornings can be used to structure media buys around the most effective days or day parts.
Similarly, TV media buyers can also use performance insights to change networks, programs or creative executions in the middle of a campaign to boost engagement. It can also be used to inform overall campaign planning. Seeing how past campaigns have performed at the cash register may be the best predictor of future performance. This can both prove TV’s impact on ROI and justify future spend.
Let’s look at an example. A convenience store chain might use TV as part of a multichannel campaign that incorporates digital banners and mobile coupons. The TV ads might focus on overall branding and messaging around low prices for milk, building audiences around families with two working parents and children under 10. With this audience identified, digital ads can be used to reinforce the messaging with mobile ads delivering coupons at a time when parents might be commuting or going past one of the store’s outlets.
By measuring footfall, the chain will be able to determine if the ads are having their intended effect on milk sales by following the journey from awareness to actual purchase. Then, by assessing the actual performance of specific media buys, they will be able to adjust the various elements. Is one TV buy outperforming another? Should couponing focus on milk or should they be used to increase overall basket size? This is the kind of actionable intelligence footfall can provide.
POS lift
The other key measurement is related directly to ROI. POS campaign footfall lift allows marketers to understand if their campaign drove an uplift in visits to a store. These kinds of insights are critical for future planning, particularly around issues related to brand loyalty, brand affinity, time to conversion and other cash-register-level metrics.
As an example, let’s consider a mall retailer that is looking to use its TV campaign to drive shoppers to its stores. They can start by measuring footfall to see if there is an actual rise in foot traffic or they can start to look at sales transactions to see if sales at individual storefronts are increasing. But then they can go a step further and start to track conversion data—are the people who are coming into the store making actual purchases? What factors are influencing those conversions (everything from store layout to merchandising mix to the actions of front line associates and managers can have an impact).
Ultimately, the TV buys can be optimized and adjusted based on a variety of real-world footfall factors. Loyalty card information and footfall traffic can be used to identify frequently shoppers patronize the store, which stores they’re visiting, and how they’re fulfilling their orders. For instance, someone who might appear to be a browser might actually be shopping in store and buying online. Their actual behavior will have an impact on the overall campaign ROI.
So, as you can see, TV is no longer a spray-and-pray sector. Today’s media buyers should be going past demographics and even past audiences and start looking at the impact of TV across the buyer journey, and footfall attribution is the key to making that powerful.
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Chris Falkner is the head of TV at Cuebiq
