What do “digital pure-play” disruptors turn to when they need to ramp up customer and revenue scale? Television advertising, according to the Video Advertising Bureau.
When studying big-spending, Silicon Valley brands the organization found some striking similarities, according to VAB CEO & President Sean Cunningham.
“We found it interesting that the biggest bet that the disrupters were making was, if you will, when it came down to the pivotal moment in their history when they really had to get big, they pushed in all the chips on television,” Cunningham says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
“It seemed that they had grown as far as they were going to grow in a pure digital, pure play world.”
So when the time came to move from thousands to millions of customers and billions of dollars in revenue from millions, “The pattern was just so alarmingly similar.”
Cunningham says it was “alarming” to see the tightness of corollaries between a television schedule going on-air and resulting traction.
“The first set of outcomes that you saw immediately were the most obvious things: site traffic, search queries, a look at their online videos, that type of thing. We understood it as a real transactional medium in terms of driving productive leads. It happens quickly.”
According to the VAB research, 14 Brand Building “disruptors” increased their TV spending 59% in 2016 and saw total digital actions (search queries, social actions and total online views) rise by 184% year over year.
The VAB membership includes virtually all of the national broadcast and ad-supported cable networks, regional cable networks, MVPD’s, major cinema advertisers and suppliers to the video advertising business. “By the end of the year, we’ll probably have members in every single video advertising format that exists,” says Cunningham.
The “simple description” of the VAB is that “we exist to answer the unanswered questions for advertisers and agencies,” including cross-screen viewership.
Among those questions are how to unlock the keys to “how do you add it all up how does it all work, what does it all do and how do we keep track of all the moving parts.
“The industry’s challenge now is to measure it all, count it all and find a way to fluidly assign the various roles and tasks, outcomes and attributes to each of it. I think that’s going to keep us more than busy,” adds Cunningham.
This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.
