Changing Channels: Making the Most of the New TV
Comcast Advertising and Freewheel created the Agency Leadership Council (ALC) as a forum to exchange ideas and thought leadership amongst a broad set of buy-side television and digital experts, including senior executives across the major and independent agencies
Changing Channels is a series of articles that together look at the changing and evolving TV ecosystem - built from the direct insights and perspectives of the ALC membership - and will span some of the most salient issues impacting TV right now, including: fragmentation and convergence, ways to harness the power of TV in all its forms, and the challenges and opportunities facing the subject of effectiveness.
PART 2: Making the Most of the New TV Ecosystem
With new capabilities come new opportunities. Brands and marketers can now truly harness the power of TV across a spectrum of business objectives and tasks – building brands over the longer-term, whilst delivering short-term performance to satisfy immediate commercial requirements, presenting deep broadcast programme integrations alongside targeted, addressable advertising. Has TV, in all its forms, ever looked so good?
TV’s multi-faceted effectiveness
"Performance" is one of those words - like "digital" - that has been hijacked within our industry to convey this idea of immediate response to an advertising exposure. Let's instead remind ourselves about how TV has, for the longest time, delivered incredible performance to brands and marketers - where performance more accurately reflects the breadth of outcomes that can be derived from objectives that businesses seek when advertising, whether this be long-term attitudinal changes or more near-term behavioural actions.
Linear, broadcast TV feels as though it is in the firing line at the moment, as industry attention shifts towards other opportunities such as Connected TV (CTV) services. But in thinking about TV's broader capabilities, we must recognise that linear TV - that still makes up the vast majority of viewing behaviour - has and will continue to deliver incredible value and return to advertisers.
"The power of "classic" TV is in its ability to realise mass reach, impact and allow advertisers to take advantage of the efficient wastage that benefits brands" observes Vicky Fox, Chief Planning Officer at OMD UK. We believe that her comment reflects an understanding of the power of the way TV advertising is consumed - passively and actively - on the big screen in the living room, and in the way it is delivered through reach and frequency levers. That “efficient wastage” creates the opportunity to broaden reach beyond existing or target customers and build brand affinity and positive sentiment to previously under-exposed or under-served audience segments.
TV has been proven to be effective at the highest level of rigour and transparency. From a macro perspective, renowned industry experts including Byron Sharp, Binet & Field, the IPA and Gain Theory have all concluded on the long-term commercial accountability of TV, promoting robust econometrically validated brand-building and commercial effectiveness. From a micro perspective, linear TV can be activated through DRTV (Direct Response TV) planning and buying practices to realise highly accountable execution for brands seeking specific business outcomes.
Why we should demand On Demand TV
On Demand TV has naturally been promoted as having unique short-term targeting and outcome capabilities. Dan Larden, Managing Partner, Product and Partnerships at Infectious Media confirms this, saying "BVOD opportunities are getting better, considering performance and outcome-based targeting". This observation highlights how CTV can be used very much like programmatic was intended - audience-data driven, highly targeted and informed impression-based buying that can be measured on a short-term basis to reflect that its impact.
TV in all its forms is not one-dimensional and can extend beyond what we naturally perceive its strengths to be. For example, On Demand TV - given how and who is using it - can build incremental, light TV audience reach, in a role that can be supportive of linear by building brand preference and persuasion, with around 14% of viewers now not watching linear. A great example of this in practice is the award-winning Barclays Bank, OMD UK and SKY Adsmart-enabled campaign, where a custom-built segment was defined through identifying households that turned on their set top boxes the least frequently, to bring a data-fuelled solution to run in combination with linear TV planning and buying.
There are of course some concerns as we see On Demand and programmatic TV emerge and grow, and Mihir Haria-Shah, Head of Broadcast at Total Media calls this out specifically in saying that "I don’t think you can build a brand on CTV currently". In unpacking this a little bit more, there are clear growing pains for CTV in considering the quality of creative that is typically being developed for programmatic TV, the challenges of targeting households rather than individuals, and perhaps most critically, that there is an obvious scarcity of premium ad units and scaled audience exposures that capture attention.
It’s not either/or, it’s and
But do these concerns matter? Not if we consider that TV is not just linear and digital or offline versus online, but is a converged and integrated ecosystem that can be better if the mutual capabilities are harnessed. Vicky Fox addresses this either/or challenge, by saying that "we have to be very wary of making TV too narrow in scope". Dan Larden also comments that "we shouldn’t be worried about the brand vs performance debate in TV - all of TV can do all of the tasks with the correct planning and implementation."
Simon Thomas, Global Director Audiences Research at GroupM, also says "brand and performance should be interchangeable - these are not binary choices. The real discussion should be focused on how TV can deliver across the core marketing discipline - setting the right objectives, developing the right content, pulling the right levers in an integrated way, and measuring well with flexibility."
Seeing the bigger picture of convergence
So, what is clear for the agency community is that - as with most things - the opportunity is really about bringing the TV ecosystem together to extract maximum value. As Harriet Perry at Omnicom Media Group UK underlines, "We shouldn’t just throw away what linear is and delivers". So how do we ensure that the industry - particularly the buy-side - sees the bigger picture to bring linear and On Demand TV together to deliver better TV planning and performance…?
Tim Willcox, Managing Director of Amnet at Dentsu suggests "education is going to be paramount to making the most out of the TV ecosystem. Both brands and agencies need this elevated understanding to help break down silos and misconceptions, create incentives to learn, and drive stronger integration between traditional TV planning and buying with that of the on-demand capabilities’’.
Somewhat surprisingly, the vast consensus of the ALC membership believes that creative and content - rather than media planning and buying - could be the one thing that unlocks this integration. TV has always been the most compelling canvas to tell a brand’s story, so it makes sense to aspire towards creativity born of great ideas, but that can be versioned to meet the opportunities of addressability - realising both linear and data-driven on demand opportunities.
Perhaps Harriet Perry says it best, remarking that "to make the most of the audience-led TV opportunity, we need to have agile content strategies that can unlock the power of data, enabling different types of creative for different types of conversations".
To be continued…