It is a century-old saying, but now the new world of data-infused TV ad buying could render it moot.
As data, analytics and attribution are applied to internet-connected TV advertising, buyers increasingly have the opportunity to prove the effectiveness of their TV spending.
“Gone are the days of, ‘50% of my advertising is working. I just don’t know which 50%’ – we now have the tools and capabilities to identify which 50%, as well as better campaigns as a whole,” says Andrew Matero, platform VP at Ampersand, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Changing history
It was 19th Century merchant John Wanamaker who is most regularly credited with saying:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
Television has long been the epitome of that expression. With no return path, TV has boasted scant resources to demonstrate its effectiveness, and has sat as a brand-building, mass-reach medium.
But the new power to target individual households and track those exposures to actions like purchase or website visit is changing all that.
Targeting TV
“Now we can apply a targeted TV campaign,” Matero adds. “Now we get to actually target the 50% that weren’t reached, and we get to make sure that ideal goal of 100% reach against your audience is actually achieved to your desired frequency with as little waste as possible.
“Post-campaign, we actually get to see which households were reached again and what frequency, and understand what’s working, what’s not working.
“You can then apply additional first-party data sources – (for example), maybe (viewers) actually signed up and we want to show them a new feature? We now get to re-target that list, and that cycle just continues going to improve campaigns.”
While 2020 may have been the year of “unpredictability” (or was it “flexibility”?), ready or not 2021 is in full swing! In the spirit of #movingtvforward, we're sharing four quick predictions as we look forward to a new year.https://t.co/b7WU6JK3kk
— Ampersand (@MeetAmpersand) January 12, 2021
Going self-serve
Ampersand is the former NCC Media, which once smoothed the path to purchasing ads in cable and is now an initiative of Comcast, Cox and Charter designed to make the buying of addressable TV easier.
As Matero says, the group has access to viewing behavior from “40 million households a hundred million TVs”.
“We get to see every TV connected to a set-top box and what’s being watched in that household,” he says.
Ampersand began trialling a self-service version of its AND planning and buying platform early in October after the platform was first launched in January.
Ampersand Launches ‘The AND Platform’ to Unify Audience and Measurement Across Inventories
We are moving TV forward. We are applying data to TV that hasn’t been available before. We are utilising first-party data sources tied to our household name and address file to identify and actually follow consumers through the entire customer journey to understand them from a broad reach play
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
