As advertisers seek ways to extend their broadcast media buys through cross-platform campaigns, cross-screen ad-delivery companies are bridging the technical gap.
Such is the case with cross-screen tool Civolution, which has teamed up with Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Brand Networks to help brands buy social ads in conjunction with live television events. Omnicom’s Resolution Media is the first agency on board to test drive a campaign beta.
Twitter rolled out Amplify last September to straddle the gap between social ads and broadcast spots; the program largely began with the network side as a means for audience extension. It was not until recently that agencies and the vendors that promise to help them predict real-time trends synced up on accounts.
“TV is still a huge medium to get your brand message across – it’s very significant and will be for a long time,” Civolution’s CEO Alex Terpstra told AdExchanger in a recent interview. “But at the same time, TV has its limitations. It’s often hard to create any sort of direct response to TV, (where your call to action is often limited to) dial in this 1-800 number or copy and paste this URL.”
Advertisers are seeking ways to extend live TV events to mobile experiences where users can easily interact with ads “by tapping them or driving them to a microsite or converting them to purchase immediately,” he added. “I think combining those … together is more what advertisers want than moving dollars away from one to the other.”
What Civolution’s technology SyncNow does is identify commercial spots on broadcast channels in real time. The technique can generally be referred to as video “fingerprinting.” Maintaining a database of some 50,000 television commercials, Civolution categorizes spots by parameters like product category, Twitter handles or Facebook URL. The platform monitors about 2,300 TV channels with reach in about 60 countries.
“Most companies work on a campaign basis so they can only recognize the spots that are previously delivered to them and are able to index them into their system,” Terpstra said.” In our case, we already have the spots because we do that (indexing) automatically, which allows you also to cross-target between brands and, in the most extreme case, competitively targeting a brand with competing TV spots.”
Although Civolution does not buy or sell inventory itself, the company aims to connect with existing social and RTB platforms, such as DSPs, agency trading desks and social PMDs, which do.
Its latest deal with Resolution Media and integration with Brand Networks’ programmatic buying platform, Open Signals, is one such example. Basically, Civolution’s SyncNow acted as the “trigger point,” alerting Brand Networks when ads for (or competing against) Resolution Media’s entertainment client, which was promoting a summer blockbuster film, aired.
Brand Networks’ Open Signals was then responsible for executing the ad buy. Resolution Media’s CurrentResolution tool (which combines campaign creative and reporting powered by Omnicom’s Annalect) worked with Open Signals to sync up the campaign creative and ad placement.
As a result, Resolution Media saw 250% lift in click-through rate (CTR) for TV-synced Twitter ad units promoting the summer blockbuster. Results were similarly strong, with a 204% uplift in CTR, for Twitter ad units synced to competitive TV spots.
Resolution Media was an early entrant in the real-time social ad buying space, beta-testing Twitter’s ads API for PepsiCo Beverages. The group, along with sister agency OMD, worked on social TV campaigns with Bluefin Labs even prior to its acquisition by Twitter in February 2013.
