It its ongoing counteroffensive against digital video companies raiding television advertising budgets, companies like Turner Broadcasting keep adding data and analytics armaments for more precise audience targeting. Then there studies the media giant has done with companies like TiVo Research documenting “massive” declines in return on investment for brands that cut their TV budgets.
“The thing we were interested in learning is, when you cut your TV dollars back, how much of a hole in sales driven by your TV advertising do you create,” Turner’s Chief Research Officer, Howard Shimmel, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
With regard to Turner’s ROI study with TiVo Research, the consultancy 84.51° and A&E Networks involving 15 consumer packaged-goods brands, the hole was deep indeed. For starters, reduced ad spend resulted in reach and frequency declines for 11 of the 15 brands, which led to a drop in sales and ROI. For every dollar decline in ad spend, the 11 brands lost 3 times that amount in return.
“The significance of the decline was really astounding in that for every dollar they took out of TV they lost three dollars in product sales attributed to that TV spend,” Shimmel says of the CPG brand marketers.
Simply stated, Turner’s goal is to build a set of ad products that improve ROI by just doing a better job of placing advertisers’ spots in its inventory that reaches the targets they really care about. It’s being flexible about implemention.
With Targeting Now, Turner keeps an advertiser’s existing inventory mix across dayparts and selling rotation, but it enhances the buy based on audience data from the likes of Nielsen, TRA and comScore Rentrak. With Audience Now, the company optimizes buys “to find the inventory that does the best job across all of our networks in reaching the audience you care about.”
A third solution, Provable ROI, takes “a massive leap to guarantee outcomes for an advertiser” beyond gross rating point delivery and audience segments. Underlying these tools is the company’s Competitive Audience Estimator, used to predict audience delivery in the future when placing spots and optimizing campaigns.
“Now that TV can target, taking both the ability to run big great creative with target, we think there’s ROI that an advertiser is going to gain and potentially it will bring some dollars back from digital to TV,” Shimmel says.
This interview is part of a series on the future of TV analytics and measurement sponsored by Tivo Research. Please visit this page for additional segments from the series.
