In a recent E-Consultancy survey, only one in 5 respondents thought that mass TV advertising would be an effective advertising tactic within 5 years. In contrast, nearly 50% thought that it wouldn’t be an effective advertising option. In an uphill struggle, TV advertising costs have increased over the past decade, a Nielsen report from 2 years ago (February 2013) stated that primetime TV advertising in 2013 was $25, up approximately 40% since June 2003.
Obviously supply and demand kicks in here. As our fragmented audiences have grown, TV channels have so far failed at creating awareness and building demand for their advertising inventory and users have flocked toward watching what we what, when we want; on a mobile phone, tablet, pc, smart TV, game console … or smart wearable!
But you’ve got to ask those that are still using TV advertising, are you making the most of it? With over 40% of tweets at UK peak time referencing television, here are 5 tips, or questions that are worth considering to help your TV advertising campaign reach its goals.
- Are you measuring the digital response straight off the back off the TV scheduling? Do you have someone actually watching Google Analytics in real time while your ads are on the TV, how long does it take before the visitor sessions arrive?
- Do you ensure you have enough visibility across Google, Bing, Facebook or your retargeted or segmented audience groups immediately after the TV ad has been on air?
- Are you doing PPC, RTB, Native, Video or Mobile advertising after your competitor has put the idea into your potential audiences head via a TV advert?
- Have you set up the latest Cohorts report in Google Analytics that measures the life time and response value of what happened when someone responded to your ad or your content?
- Beyond all that, there is some clever kit such as TV Squared for those that need to measure which TV channel to advertise on; this works particularly well, especially when it is set up and planned and running at the same time as the ‘traditional’ digital marketing suite of paid, social and organic channels.
So much can and will change over the next 5 years and it will be interesting to see how simulcasting affects advertising revenues, especially with the option to interact with live ‘streamed’ video ads based on your location. Within 5 years there is no reason why we won’t have programmatic TV advertising as standard on catch up TV as viewing habits continue to evolve and technology makes everything easier.
So I’m not giving up on the TV ads yet – we like TV, it’s just going to change a bit. Of course, the more local or personalised TV options there are for the advertiser, the more relevant the messaging can be and the better the response should be. TV; just like search and all things digital, needs to be local and relevant to their audience; it’s an issue for primetime that won’t go away until TV starts getting more personalised. This will happen; primetime as we currently know it will continue to slowly dwindle in numbers, but people viewing the content will grow and TV revenue models will evolve accordingly.
Making the most of it, and how you join up TV advertising and paid media, using a paid media audit as part of your strategy is a great place to start.
