Data and Audience
In our Anatomy of a Solution series, we take a look at some direct challenges and disruptive solutions that Amsive has driven for clients. This week, we look at how performance TV is breaking the mold to reach audiences across channels, publishers, devices.
The Basics
TV isn’t just the box that sits in your living room anymore. Content is on your phone, tablet, and laptop. In omnichannel marketingiOmnichannel marketing is delivering a targeted, consistent and often personalized message to your consumer that is the same across all channels and devices. Unlike multi-channel marketing which delivers unique cross-channel messages, omnichannel marketing aims at making a purchase seamless for the consumer thanks to consistent messaging. An omnichannel marketing strategy s... Read More, this is where the concept of performance television comes in. Performance TV is made up of over-the-top (OTT), which is basically the delivery of TV shows via the internet, and connected television (CTV), which refers to smart TVs that can be connected to the internet and access contentiContent is a broad term used in marketing that covers everything from videos, blogs, articles, web copy, marketing copy or advertisements used to convey relevant and effective information about a brand or company that consumers have an interest in consuming. Content marketing has become a popular way to generate brand awareness by using a blog or article to introduce someo... Read More beyond the normal cable TV restraints.
Compared with other advertising channels, this one is dramatically on the rise. We’ve seen ad spending increase by 27.1 percent, and up to over $8 billion this year. It’s destinations like YouTube, Hulu, and Roku that account for about half of the total performance TV ad revenues.
The real marketing sweet spot for performance TV in the customer and business lifecycle revolves around acquisition, but also with a focus on brand awareness with the intent of driving a consumer to purchase that spans across any number of industries and verticals including healthcare, financial services, insurance, retail and more.
Many customers might have tried TV ads, but might not have been successful. In our experience, an agency representing a brand came to us with a disastrous TV performance that lacked a substantial ROIiReturn on investment (ROI) is simply the measure of what was spent on a marketing campaign compared to the sales that were a result of that marketing campaign. More simply put, for every dollar a company spends on marketing, how much money is that effort generating in sales. On a larger scale, ROI is a key metric used to not only determine success of markteing efforts, but... Read More to capture both younger and older demographics.
The Challenge
Many clients would love to get into the TV space. Those that have done it typically say they’d do more if they were able to target specific audiences, or to only pay for people that have viewed a particular ad.
One of the details that really stands out in this space is that younger audiences are extremely likely to be performance TV viewers. But when you look at the older demos, those consumers are extremely substantial as well. Still, brands think TV seems like a gamble because the perception is that it casts too wide a net for that big of an investment.
The question for brands then becomes: to TV or not the TV?
To get retargeting ads to be very effective, we have to start with strong video content. For an agency like Amsive, we try to position targeted performance TV campaigns for clients as a top-of-funnel marketingiThe marketing funnel shows your customer's journey with your business from discovery to purchase. Companies employ marketing funnels so they can understand their customers' needs and ultimately optimize marketing efforts to generate more sales. By paying attention to your marketing funnel, you can better gauge what your company needs to do to influence consumers at variou... Read More function to help attract new customers and strengthen brands, deliver highly relevant and highly targeted messaging to predetermined personas, and reduce acquisition costs and increase efficiency.
Then the question really becomes: Who does performance television work for?
We’re looking to place clients both where their targeted audiences are engaging and where we’re going to see the biggest rate of return back.
The Solution
The barrier to entry lies with a few factors. Every client wants to strengthen their brand, expand their reach, capture a targeted audience, and maximize ad spend. But, typically successful clients have already utilized TV creative in some form, and have a minimum monthly budget of $20,000 with a minimum audience of 30,000 reachable consumers.
Once that basic threshold is met, the differentiator for Amsive lies in a dual-part strategy.
Audience Strategy
The first thing to do to draw out and build an audience is looking at first-party dataiFirst-party data is information about a consumer collected directly from that person's online habits. It is an important piece of information that can help you understand your customers because it is based on actual interactions with your brand. In other words, it's not hypothetical trends but actual habits by a real consumer. This data can include everything from purchase... Read More. For our client, we were able to engage a retargeting campaign with data such as addresses, phone numbers, email, user device IDs, or digital monitoring platform data that was used to match back and guarantee ad relevance for viewers. Further third-party dataiUnlike first- and second-party data where a company has either had direct contact with a consumer or has done so through a trusted partner, third-party data is simply information about a consumer that is acquired from an organization having no direct affiliation with a particular company or brand. Often, third-party data can include information about a consumer that has be... Read More can dig further down to capture desired personas with everything from age, gender, income, household size, and more.
For example, if somebody in need of a new car views or engages with a full 15-30-second commercial for a new Toyota Prius, we can determine how that ad is delivered, where it’s delivered, and how it can be measured across performance TV channels. Uniquely tailored performance TV ads for the same business, product, or service can hit on TVs, if viewers open up their phone, if they log on to a browser, or more.
Channel Strategy
This supplementary component ensures that ads can appear on specific brand-safe programs that target audiences who are likely to view or want to consume the client’s products or services. We want to capture what we call “living room quality.” This means the strategy takes into consideration deploying ads not just across high-quality primary networks, but also across advantageous episode-based programming in the most prominent screen with the most play-time.
When we think about this channel strategyiUnlike omnichannel marketing where the same, consistent message is delivered across all channels, multichannel marketing delivers unique cross-channel messages that can be created specifically for a particular channel and vary from channel to channel. The challenge for marketers in creating an effective multichannel marketing campaign is selecting the correct channel for t... Read More, it’s also all in the quality of the creative and the messaging, and how we are putting it together to tie in an omnichannel approach. Robust messaging always compliments each marketing component. If a particular product is in-market, then the messaging should be relevant and cohesive to the other messages that end up on multiple retargeted channels beyond TV.
With people increasingly cutting the cord of their cable subscriptions, performance TV is on the rise. These channels are no longer marginal. It can no longer be a maybe-we-should-do-it point of view for brands.
The Results
An advertising campaign is only as good as the return it brings. We’re looking to place clients both where their targeted audiences are engaging and where we’re going to see the biggest rate of return back.
Amsive’s differentiator with our struggling client was our ability to target those people who began to view ads, then interacted with them, and exchanged with them across different display networks where we were able to determine deep insight into the audience’s activity.
We were able to show the client how these people go through their own sales funneliA sales funnel is a visual representation of the journey a consumer takes from being a prospect to the act of making a purchase. Once a consumer is identified as a "lead" they are entered into the sales funnel and begin going through "phases" such as awareness, interest, evaluation, decision. As that consumer is nurtured and courted by a company or brand, they move further... Read More and become actual customers via deep analytics, which ultimately gave an ROI-specific understanding of the consumer journeyiThe customer journey is a customer’s path from discovery of your product or service to their decision to purchase. Did your customer click on an ad for a Caribbean vacation and then maybe look at additional photos of the islands? Maybe they Googled “best places to stay in the Caribbean” or asked friends on social media for feedback from their trips before returning t... Read More.
Given the stay-at-home lockdowns of the pandemic, and with people increasingly cutting the cord of their cable subscriptions, performance TV is on the rise. These channels are no longer marginal. It can no longer be a maybe-we-should-do-it point of view for brands. With the right scale and inventory, precision targeting, premium inventory, dynamic spend optimization, and best-in-class reporting and attribution — agencies like Amsive will continue to deliver in new channels.
