Thinking about using TV ads for your target marketing strategy? Get answers to these questions and be ready to decide if advanced TV advertising is right for you.
When looking at the right advertising solution, data-driven TV campaigns are effective tools to make an impact and increase overall ROI on your marketing budgets. Be picky when choosing your TV partners.
New advances in the ability to target audience insights and allow reporting of audience location, confirm network environment, and apply data-driven measurement of performance are now available. So when it comes to knowing the TV environment and how to best reach your target audience it's important to ask these eight questions.
1. Are media reps restricted to certain inventory?
When using TV advertising being able to tap into high quality TV impressions is important. If your partner or agency has pre-arranged inventory deals, that can limit the range of solutions that can be considered. If you choose to combine layers of TV and digital, knowing where your impressions are happening can direct you where to fill holes or heavy up to increase impact. Knowing where they aren't happening is even more important for advertising on TV.
2. How do you index audience data against any given location?
By measuring your well-defined target market across TV coverage footprints, concentrations of audience are revealed. Advertisers can achieve far better precision with both planning campaigns and measuring campaign effectiveness if the analysis is done at least to the zip code level. Things to ask: Are certain types of audiences spread out and have lower than average index (a comparison of concentrations) numbers? How about multiple target audience profiles and combining areas into counties, states and regions to see trends? Do certain media vendors have gaps in their coverage?
3. Is the pricing transparent? Does it separate media costs, data costs, and technology and service fees, fees for third party vendors?
Buying TV advertising can be tricky when combining traditional TV and Advanced TV. Knowing what you pay for can leverage that information and allow the brand to decide the value of the media in comparison to other TV advertising costs. Knowing what you are paying for allows you to compare a digital video (Targeted Cost Per Thousand) TCPM of $35 to a TV TCPM of $35 to see what kind of scale and impact each can have.
4. Can my specific prospect list (aka first party data) be integrated into your audience targeting?
Having your own first party data is almost always the best, and it provides the most direct campaign planning and performance tracking that's important to you. Nobody knows your strategic target audience or prospect, better than you do. For that reason being able to apply first party data to your advanced TV campaigns is a crucial requirement. For brands, data integration should be as simple as exporting a two column Excel file no PII to worry about. Goals to consider up front: Is increase in foot traffic per store important? Is increase in same store sales your goal? Are you opening a new location that people within 5 miles need to know about? Are you trying to conquest new prospects?
5. Are you provided reporting by location, at the daypart, program and network level?
Knowing where your media dollars are efficient can allow you to optimize your spend. If media vendors don't tell you where your impressions are happening, then how do you know which part drove success? Comparing your TV advertising costs by market, daypart and network let's you see which factor is the most important.
6. Does the media vendor have an integrated attribution measurement? Or is it using third party measurement vendors?
For advertisers used to traditional TV advertising, this allows comparisons between one’s current campaign and results from past campaigns. Nielsen and comScore have laid the foundation of measurement, but newer entrants into the ad tracking business may work too. Check out our use case showing tracking of impressions and sales lift.
7. Is there a way to apply attribution measurement? Which third-party measurement vendors can be as granular as you need with enough scale to make it significant?
This is where "probably vs definitely" comes into play. Did someone decide about a purchase because of the last offer seen (say a discount on their cell phone?) Or did they just happen to recognize a brand name right when they needed to pick up a bottle of spirits for a party gift (brand awareness?) Tracking different kinds of actions can come from several sources. Attribution measurement can be done in studies that combine all the TV and digital impressions in specific areas. Top of the funnel attribution and brand awareness can be measured, middle of the funnel can be measured with web site visits and foot traffic studies, and of course sales lift measured against TV impressions delivered by ZIP code against historic sales trend can be very successful.
8. Can your agency provide impressions within network and MVPD inventory (e.g. not just through TV aggregators)?
Cable interconnect and network sources offer inventory that is solid in terms of cost effectiveness, especially for national buyers. If precision is desired across localized areas though, we can create any combination of 210 markets so the entire country can be viewed as a whole. A word of caution about TV aggregators, they tend to offer the inexpensive, remnant, or poorly rated time slots that are measured only by cheap CPMs and don't let you have control of where your spots are running.
To repeat the answer to the first question: being able to tap into high quality TV impressions is important. If you are combining layers of TV and digital, knowing where your impressions are happening can direct you where to fill holes or heavy up to increase impact. Knowing where the media is not valuable is even more important. As they say in real estate "Location, location, location."
