Over the last few years of digital marketing evolution, two accepted wisdoms have bubbled up.
First, that TV is a top-of-funnel advertising medium – good for sparking interesting, but difficult to tack consumers all the way through to purchase.
Second, that digital media are supremely measurable, but that they can make little impact on the TV screen.
Well, the emergence of addressable and over-the-top TV services – and advertising technology that connects to them – is bringing a third option that sits somewhere in between. Now companies like Alphonso are helping brands use internet-delivered TV advertising to spark interest – and track an actual offline purchase later down the line.
“The first application of this was using for ad retargeting, stuff like that, which is phenomenally powerful and working well,” says the TV ad-tech platform’s CEO Ashish Chordia. “Where we are going now, in last year, this year, next year, is taking this data and figuring out interesting ways to marry this data with a variety of offline data sources.
“It produces super interesting and detailed understanding of, what on TV is, one, driving offline behavior and purchases.”
Earlier this year, Alphonso struck a deal with marketing data company IRI to enhance the capability.
“If you know there are loyal households, you know from IRI data that people are, actually, buying these things, then you can now infer back, or, in fact, connect back the dots, from purchase to viewership, and be able to look at what’s working and what’s not working.”
