Both classic TV and now programmatic advertising have become an integral part of the advertising world as marketing channels. In doing so, advertisers are giving away potential when they manage their campaigns in isolation across the channels and do not interlock them in the media mix. Linear TV in particular — although declining among the young target group — still has high coverage, but is only coordinated with digital channels to a limited extent in media planning.
Current solutions in the USA are showing the direction: “Consolidated TV buying” or “Consolidated media buying of moving images in TV and digital.” Using comprehensive IDs (“IFA”), initial campaigns are uniformly planned and managed via connected TV and digital moving images. Until such solutions are comprehensively available in this country as well, advertisers should be aware of how a good combination of different channels can be achieved, which reach the desired target group and increase advertising impact.
Branding and performance in combination
The amount of the advertising budget has a decisive influence on the media mix. For most advertisers who invest budgets on a significant scale, TV (to achieve brand recognition) and search (to realize buying potential) are efficient channels, but they must be optimally coordinated to achieve the corresponding effect. Programmatic advertising, properly planned and implemented, complements these two tasks: The brand is strengthened and new products are introduced. In this way, both latent and concrete willingness to buy can be activated. The special thing about programmatic advertising is that the branding component of classic display advertising is supplemented by a performance facet. Programmatic not only takes demographic characteristics into account, but also extends them to include individual interests or the user's surfing behavior in order to reflect specific buying intents. This not only has a positive effect on reducing wastage in brand communication, but also includes sales, which are also fuelled by performance channels such as search and retargeting. In order for the channels to optimally benefit from each other and to grow both customer numbers and a company's turnover through improved advertising impact, coordination of advertising media is essential. In creation and delivery of advertising material, the various channels must be coordinated as part of storytelling and contact class optimization in order to achieve an effect. In addition, a strategic budget allocation that makes the concrete added value of additional advertising expenditure verifiable must not be left out. The focus is on choosing the right KPIs and their hierarchy: viewability and target group reach can represent secondary goals, which are combined with other important factors to form a central KPI for advertising impact, next to which the resulting sale is the second overriding goal.
Marketing mix modelling and attribution
Contemporary attribution models attempt to depict current events in the media landscape and user behavior resulting from a complex customer journey. As a result of the increasing number of users, devices and channels, the number of touchpoints that need to be captured and measured is growing. Marketing decision makers can make allocation decisions in the best possible way by showing the value contribution each individual touchpoint makes in a campaign. Instead of setting a conversion value, a realistic value should be chosen. When comparing digital to TV, for example, a qualified visit can be selected as a basis for comparison. The advantage of this is that dynamic attribution is not only focused on performance. Marketing mix modelling also tries to take into account other factors outside the campaign, such as market data or competitor behavior, but also effects such as promotional campaigns. However, this often results in difficulties due to incomplete data or ambiguous causalities, so that these models tend to include more room for interpretation.
The shift from linear TV to digital moving image
The decline in (younger) audience share in linear TV and the resulting decline in efficiency is no secret. One result is that the effect of linear TV on the customer journey is often offset by excessive costs. The difficulty lies, among other things, in the comparability of TV and digital. This is also reflected in the fact that linear TV and the associated panel logic from AGF and AGOF, among others, are reaching their limits when it comes to depicting real user behavior and actual net reach of target groups. In this case, favorable-sounding CPs are not necessarily a good media investment due to the unproven reach of target groups and contact doses. To increase media effectiveness and efficiency, the impact of online video advertising (including connected and smart TV) must be measured in conjunction with the other marketing channels and ideally managed across campaigns from a single source. In order to evaluate advertising impact, it is important to correctly analyze the value contribution of TV — KPIs such as qualified traffic uplift can be more than a remedy here. Digital offerings such as YouTube and the shift in media consumption to other Internet-based media — whether as a “first” or “second screen” — must be taken into account significantly more in advertising planning in order to increase reach and reach target groups.
Measure advertising impact correctly and implement it in planning
It is useful to question evaluation criteria in order to correctly assess the success of a programmatic campaign and its individual components (display & video). For example, results such as the actual distribution of contacts when reaching target groups are often left out — although these factors are essential to comprehensively assess advertising impact and optimize campaigns. OTS and GRP considerations are traditionally learned here — which, based on average contacts, only show how often which proportion of the target group has just seen the advertisement on average, but not how often individual people have actually been discussed with the advertising. The distribution of contact in the target group would be a decisive control factor if you take into account that a branding effect only starts after a number of, for example, four to five contacts with the advertising medium (depending on the industry). For this reason, it is crucial for the success of a programmatic campaign running in conjunction with TV that the actual contact dose per user is evaluated and optimized — in comparison with TV planning, which should help determine the target corridor for the digital part. Insights from reaching digital target groups can, conversely, be incorporated into traditional TV planning and contribute to an optimized budget distribution between channels.
TV & Programmatic — not versus, but coordinated
The “consolidated media purchasing of TV and digital”, which is just beginning to establish itself technically in the USA, is still a long way off for the German market, but there are no obstacles to consolidated planning and management approaches. When campaigns are continuously optimized based on the right KPIs and advertising budgets are allocated using modern methods, the desired advertising effect can be achieved — where programmatic advertising is more than a technically complex add-on, but ideally contributes to a strategic interplay of channels and formats for holistic branding — TV, digital moving image and display — and brings brand success.
This post is first posted at Adzine appeared.
