TV ad budgets are facing increased scrutiny as economic uncertainty grows, mass layoffs continue and consumers’ wallets tighten. Brands have started to pull back marketing spend throughout Q3 and into Q4, including the world’s biggest-spending advertiser, P&G. Yet, most of those advertisers find themselves held to the same ROI and performance goals. Even marketers with the same or increased budgets find that the current economic climate increases the pressure to prove TV’s value.
How can advertisers stretch TV ad budgets to drive cost efficiency and justify their investment in the channel? Precision, cross-platform TV ad measurement is critical. iSpot has 5 measurement strategies advertisers can implement to prove and maximize the value of every TV ad dollar spent.
1. Keep Tabs on the Competition
The widespread impact of recessions on TV ad budgets can disrupt the status quo for entire industries, creating opportunities for some brands to gain share of voice while others fade from screens. Monitoring competitors’ TV ad strategies and comparing performance against industry benchmarks, such as TV ad impressions SOV, keeps advertisers ahead of any recession curveballs. With further insight into competitors’ media plans across networks, programs and dayparts, advertisers can identify white space opportunities to increase share of voice and reach untapped audiences.
Key Tactic: Second-by-second measurement of every TV ad and program means advertisers don’t miss a beat of their own TV ad performance and that of their competitors’. iSpot provides granular creative and media measurement data at scale so advertisers get a true understanding of how their campaigns stack up against the competition.
2. Optimize TV Ad Campaigns in Real Time
Advertisers need accurate and actionable TV ad data while there’s still time and budget to make in-flight optimizations. As advertising spend is scrutinized across channels, having access to TV ad data at the same speed as digital will be critical for making sure budgets are not cut in the wrong places.
Key Tactic: Time is money. Advertisers need access to real-time TV ad data in a centralized, easy-to-access dashboard. Otherwise, the time and effort spent piecing together reports makes the insights gleaned less actionable and takes resources away from other projects.
Impact With iSpot: Adobe achieved a 75% reduction in time to optimize cross-platform campaigns and provide insights by leveraging iSpot Unified Measurement. Access to real-time performance analytics in the iSpot dashboard meant TV could finally be included in larger weekly marketing performance rates, which ultimately helped the Adobe marketing team secure more funding for CTV campaigns.
3. Balance Awareness and Business Outcome Performance
Smart brands know optimizing TV campaigns across the funnel, from awareness to conversion, will drive the strongest ROAS. As advertisers brace for a recession, tying TV spend to real business outcomes is a sure-fire way to defend spend. In order to better track and optimize return on ad investments, advertisers must be cognizant of TV ad impact on behaviors like web visits, foot traffic, and purchases.
Key Tactic: Identify and compare conversion rates and lift with iSpot across networks and streaming publishers to uncover where TV ad dollars create the strongest efficiencies in a media plan. Instead of cutting spend, reallocate investments to favor top performing channels that drive better ROAS.
Impact With iSpot: When expanding from linear-only into streaming, Amica used iSpot to justify and optimize their investment. Originally, the brand measured performance based on brand awareness and completion rates. After adding the ability to measure incremental conversions across individual publishers, Amica found that streaming ads converted 6x more than linear, which led to greater efficiencies for the brand’s cross-platform TV investment.
4. Incorporate TV Into Attribution Models for 360° Performance Insights
By folding powerful, device-level TV ad exposure data into existing marketing mix models, advertisers can truly understand the brand and conversion impact of TV on cross-channel performance. Though, to drive greater impact on overall marketing performance the real opportunities occur with the ability to measure and optimize TV ad performance in real time using the other strategies featured in this post.
Key Tactic: Connect iSpot’s individual device-level TV ad exposure data across linear and streaming with incremental conversion data in your existing modeling. With any KPI, iSpot brings brands the ability to deterministically measure the impact of TV and streaming ads on outcomes, resulting in performance-driven decision making that can lead to greater ROAS.
Impact With iSpot: DriveTime worked with iSpot to integrate TV data into their models to fill blindspots and gain deeper insight into incremental impact of TV ad spend. DriveTime then boosted ROAS by 26% year over year by determining an optimal frequency for each linear TV network.
5. Improve Targeting Efficiency
One way advertisers can do more with less is to improve targeting so that ads better reach audiences that are more likely to take action. In TV, this means going beyond traditional age and gender demos. Leveraging deep demographic data from 1st and 3rd party sources can enable targeting that reaches a brand’s unique customer segments.
Key Tactic: Advertisers that connect 1st-party customer segments and 3rd-party data, like purchase or behavior-based segments, can discover media buying opportunities to better reach their unique audiences. This more efficient targeting can drive stronger ROAS as advertisers are allocating spend to the networks, programs and dayparts that index highest among consumers that are most likely to convert.
As many advertisers face difficult decisions with strained resources, having access to granular, real-time TV ad measurement will drive greater efficiencies when every dollar counts. If you do not have full visibility into your cross-platform TV advertising performance, this is the time to rethink your measurement tools. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how iSpot can help you recession-proof your TV advertising.