For TV-first advertisers—those who rely on linear TV to drive mass awareness and sales—the Big Game this weekend is more alluring than ever. After all, how many times a year is there a mass entertainment event with 100M+ viewers and social media virality baked in?
TV events like this reinforce the strength of appointment viewing, but they’re still outliers to the on-demand, cross-platform behavior of today. They’re also a good reminder of how difficult it can be to build effective reach and frequency through traditionally planned campaigns.
In fact, as much as one wants to think of linear TV as the gold standard for “broad reach,” the majority of large TV buys only reach about 65 to 75 percent of your target. And among some of the most prized demographics, it’s even less. Almost half of adults 22-45 are watching absolutely no content on traditional TV platforms.
Create a holistic media plan
For many campaigns, TV can do the heavy lifting and build reach quickly, but it can’t do it all. To be truly effective, you must reach as much of your strategic target as possible and “buying more TV” isn’t a strategy that’s going to achieve that goal efficiently.
Nor is simply adding more channels like mobile, digital display or native. Without insights into whether or not consumers have been exposed in one channel or another, blindly adding channels to a media strategy will only get overlap and inefficiency. To truly extend the reach of a TV campaign, you must avoid those who have already seen your ad on TV and actively target people who have not.
Holistic media planning—something that brands and agencies have been scrambling to implement to keep up with how consumers consume media across channels—has been the goal of marketers for a generation. But less than half of all media campaigns are expected to be planned holistically across channels in 2019.
The good news? Once you see the impact of holistic planning across TV, digital and social, there’s no going back.
Greater reach, greater efficiency
Today, you can access cross-channel TV & digital viewership data to understand which networks and shows consumers are watching on linear and OTT, the brands they were exposed to, and which digital behaviors are associated with these TV audiences. This means you can identify the consumers who have never been exposed to your TV ad—or perhaps just lightly exposed—and then build custom targeting segments to reach them through other channels. This builds unique reach with greater efficiency.
It gets better: With these insights into your consumer’s cross-screen viewing, you can now manage frequency across screens, limiting over-exposure. No overlap, no waste.
Better insights into actual demographics
Holistic media planning also opens bi-directional insights and solutions. For instance, as convergent planning and measurement tools have matured, you can now identify which demographics are contributing most to extending a campaign’s reach from TV to digital environments.
For example, you might assume that younger generations aren’t watching traditional TV and think that the only way to reach them is through social video—certainly indicative of viewing behavior. But actual analysis might reveal that your customer segment was, in fact, reached through OTT. These holistic insights will identify where to focus your buy.
Now go a step further. What part of that segment was exposed to a competitor’s offer? You can retarget that group online to defend mindshare, awareness and product differentiation through competitive conquesting on the exact channels where they will be impacted the most.
That’s just the start. Having an omnichannel view ultimately provides deep insights that reach far beyond mere campaign effectiveness and incremental reach. Through cross-channel exposure, brand affinity and sales correlation studies, you can now understand what is driving business results from cross-screen campaigns.
TV and digital cannot operate in silos any longer. If you’re still leading with TV and then simply adding in another distribution channel later, you’re missing the opportunity to get a 360-degree view of your customer for more informed buying decisions. Moreover, you’re missing the end-to-end access to your customer at all touch points to reach, nurture and ultimately convert them.
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As chief strategy officer, Philip Smolin is responsible for driving Amobee’s global strategy and key growth initiatives that integrate data, analytics and programmatic activation to deliver industry-leading solutions for global marketers operating on the Amobee platform. A digital marketing innovator for more than 24 years, Philip is an industry expert on data and analytics, programmatic media buying, audience targeting and the emerging business models redefining marketing.
