After two weeks of nonstop skiing, skating and curling action—in VR, too, no less—it’s time for viewers to rest their quintuple-axel-crossed eyeballs and for advertisers to review their reports.
For the first time, advertisers received a “total viewer guarantee” that covered broadcast, cable and digital, letting them see how many people viewed their ad and through which channel. By including people who aren’t watching on linear TV, the guarantee is proof of today’s cross-screen reality and the need for advertisers and networks to align themselves with it.
While it is a step in the right direction, advertisers will find that these viewership reports are not granular enough. Viewer guarantees, for example, were set up using P2-plus ratings (people age 2 and above), household ratings not necessarily applicable in a people-based marketing world.
There’s a lot of room for advertisers to truly track audiences across channels and devices—not just during tent-pole sports events, but continually. Two places to start include working with an identity resolution provider to unpack cross-screen behavior at the individual level, and using first- and third-party data to take better advantage of the many ways to send targeted messages and measure the results.
Understand audiences as people
“Who saw my ad and are they relevant to my business?” This is a pretty basic question that all advertisers want the answer to after major events like sports championships or awards shows. Many still find it difficult to answer, which makes it hard to accurately determine return on ad spend and optimize future campaigns, among other advertising musts.
A big step advertisers can take to answer this question is to adopt identity resolution. This technology connects disparate advertising tactics across channels—display, search, social and TV—to people, all in an anonymized, privacy-conscious manner.
Through identity resolution, advertisers can see whether someone saw an ad on TV, signed up to receive emails, browsed a company’s website, pinned a product on Pinterest, and eventually bought it. A previously unknown omnichannel journey snaps into focus and the true impact of TV relative to other channels is uncovered.
So with identity resolution, advertisers can take reports from any platform or channel to get a more granular view into what’s working across screens and apply those learnings to other omnichannel campaigns.
Tap into new data sources
Data is the new oil—it keeps things running—especially for TV advertisers that previously did not have access to granular data sets for their campaigns. With more data-driven ways to target and analyze audiences through advanced TV, advertisers can bring TV fully into their omnichannel campaigns and begin to understand their audiences’ behavior across all media.
Advertisers can start building audiences for data-driven linear TV targeting—a flavor of advanced TV—by taking first-party CRM files and converting and matching them to TV viewership. This optimizes media investment and messaging across platforms.
This data matching can give advertisers a 10 to 20 percent lift in TV ad delivery to their core audiences. Once advertisers have done this, granular measurement and attribution reporting can be performed using ad exposure from a viewership source matched against sales conversion data, other CRM inputs, or location data.
Regardless of channel or platform delivery, advertisers can also engage third-party data providers to better understand audiences and target prospective customers. It is important for advertisers to vet these companies properly and to understand how the data was collected and sourced. It’s equally vital to understand that segments on digital cannot always be overlaid onto TV and vice versa, and that they are subject to different business rules. So as much as digital and TV are converging, each team still needs to do their own data buying to achieve their desired results.
By doing the above, advertisers can see how their campaigns are performing and match their understanding with metrics the networks can provide. This accountability on both ends is what will advance the ecosystem and help all players succeed in our cross-screen reality.
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Allison Metcalfe is general manager of the TV division at LiveRamp. She is responsible for driving the strategy around bringing people-based marketing capabilities to television. Prior to LiveRamp, she served as the senior director of customer success at Demandbase, and also worked at Jigsaw (now Data.com, acquired by Salesforce) and Equilar.
