Home On TV & Video Before Convergent TV Can Take Off, Advertisers Need To See Outcomes

Before Convergent TV Can Take Off, Advertisers Need To See Outcomes

SHARE:

On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. 

Today’s column is by Spencer Lambert, manager of product and partnership success at datafuelX

Heading into upfront negotiations prior to the pandemic, there was definitive industry momentum toward business outcomes. On the sell side, players like A+E, Warner and NBC were citing outcome-based guarantees or optimization tools, while on the buy-side, agencies like Horizon Media were announcing large strategic commitments to this initiative.

With this year’s upfronts now underway, ramifications of the pandemic have largely halted this agenda, with Nielsen’s loss of MRC accreditation and the ensuing currency wars eclipsing most other conversations.

But it is critical that measurement discussions continue to include the strategic goal of outcome-based guarantees in a linear and, eventually, convergent TV world. Or else the television industry risks falling further and further behind digital capabilities. 

TV should be held to digital standards 

As we near convergent TV, questions regarding the language, metrics and guarantees of cross-channel planning remain. Will it be old-school linear buyers bringing GRP language to addressable methodology? Or will it be digital buyers bringing a CPA-like view of inventory to the linear world?

Facebook, Google and Amazon account for more than 35% of advertising market share. They provide a clear picture of outcome-based purchasing on their platforms. Linear television’s reach allowed it to play by different measurement rules for a long time, but it’s obvious that a concentrated effort to prove greater value to advertisers is necessary: 

  1. Advertisers want to know how to attribute consumer behavior to television spots
  2. Advertisers need defined benchmarks or baselines for success

Directly attributing consumer behavior to a national television spot will always be challenging, but that’s not to say it can’t be done. Data companies like EDO, TVision and PlaceIQ present views of consumer behavior such as search engagement, viewability or store visitation as a result of national ad airings.

For more exact attribution, deterministic data sets can be employed on a first-party level, or sources such as Catalina can be used to get a national TV understanding of website traffic or sales lifts.

As for benchmarking, it can be addressed by holding publishers only to the vertical they can truly control: ad placement. By constructing guarantees on a lift in outcomes compared to a baseline (non-optimized campaign), publishers would be held to placing ads in spots that perform best for advertisers, not to a gross sales number that could be thrown out the window with another lockdown.

Outcome-based buying reduces waste

If we as an industry don’t begin to hold ourselves up to the attribution level set by our digital counterparts, market share will continue to hemorrhage, not because of declining viewership but because of an inability to adapt to marketer expectations. 

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

We consistently speak of dollars used on the wrong audience as waste. It’s time to start discussing dollars disconnected from consumer behavior as waste.

Follow AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Must Read

Critics Say The Trade Desk Is Forcing Kokai Adoption, But Apparently It’s Up To Agencies

Is TTD forcing agencies to adopt the new Kokai interface despite claims they can still use the interface of their choice? Here’s what we were able to find out.

Why Big Brand Price Increases Will Flatten Ad Budgets

Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.

The IAB Tech Lab Isn’t Pulling Any Punches In The Fight Against AI Scraping

IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur didn’t mince his words when declaring unauthorized generative AI scraping of publisher content “theft, full stop.”

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Gamechanger (Google lost the DOJ's search antitrust case)

Here’s Who’s Testifying During The Remedy Phase Of Google’s Ad Tech Antitrust Trial

Last week, the DOJ and Google filed their respective witness lists and the exhibit lists for the remedy phase of the ad tech antitrust trial. Lots of familiar faces!

MX8 Labs Launches With A Plan To Speed Up The Survey-Based Research Biz

What’s the point of a market research survey that could take weeks, when consumer sentiment is rollercoasting up and down every day? That’s the problem MX8 Labs aims to tackle.