Linear TV may be losing its luster, as streaming rapidly becomes a top performance channel.
Just ask performance marketing agency Tinuiti and its client NOBULL, an athletic footwear and apparel brand popular with the CrossFit crowd.
The two recently partnered with NBCUniversal on a campaign to assess the effectiveness of advertising on streaming platforms.
The conclusion? Streaming is pretty darn effective at driving outcomes up and down the funnel.
You can have it both ways
But NOBULL’s goal was to figure out the best way to strike a balance between upper- and lower-funnel impact.
People often assume that channels either build brand awareness and resonance or drive immediate conversion. But they can do both at the same time, Chris Gil, NOBULL’s digital marketing director, told AdExchanger.
CTV wasn’t always considered a performance driver, though, likely because of how difficult it is to measure. But NOBULL saw measurable improvements in revenue and KPI from its test with NBCU, proving “something that we all intuitively know,” as Gil put it.
Tinuiti fed first-party data from NOBULL into Bliss Point, the agency’s proprietary platform that uses machine learning to determine the optimal ad spend for a specific channel to help maximize campaign efficacy.
Through its long-standing collaboration with NBCU, Tinuiti also has access to NBCU’s identifiers that allow the two companies to match first-party audience information in a data clean room and use it to target and measure campaigns.
But Tinuiti doesn’t gatekeep this data. Clients have access to the data from their own campaigns, which gives them real-time visibility into whether they’re meeting their KPIs.
For example, the Bliss Point dashboard shows how paid media – a video ad, say – impacts the upper funnel, Gil said, but also shows the impact “all the way down to driving a result and a purchase.”
CTV: Credibility TV?
But before people make a purchase, they need to know and trust the brand.
And there’s something about “appearing on the living room screen [that] just adds a layer of credibility to brands,” said Gil. This is especially true for younger demographics, who compose most of NOBULL’s audience. For them, appearing on streaming platforms goes beyond visibility and actually serves to further trust.
“Video really resonates with users in a way that is incredibly impactful throughout the funnel,” said Kaitlyn Caimano, Tinuiti’s chief investment officer.
For NOBULL’s recent effort, Tinuiti split the brand’s audience into a test group that wasn’t exposed to paid search and a control group that was. Caimano referred to the latter as the “business as usual media mix.”
The goal of the campaign, which was activated directly through Bliss Point, was to see whether NOBULL could shift some of its paid search and social budget to CTV and still sustain its site traffic levels and purchase volume.
Stream on
And the shift did more than sustain; it improved NOBULL’s results.
In addition to a 20% increase in site traffic between the test and control groups, NOBULL saw an 18% lift in nonbranded shopping clicks as a result of the campaign and a 5.5% increase in purchases.
Based on these results, NOBULL increased its CTV spending over the past year by double-digits and has no plans to slow down. Its long-term goal is to continue engaging new customers, and CTV has now proven itself to be one of the most effective and scalable ways to do so.
“We were not surprised at the power of the platform,” said Alison Levin, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships. But the extent, she said, was “even better than we had imagined.”
