TV’s New Golden age

TV is thriving as never before and advertisers should embrace it in all its forms.

TV is in fine fettle. Despite an avalanche of new platforms and devices – hello Nintendo Switch – it’s still the main game in town.

It’s not just the great shows such as Game of Thrones and Humans but also the ability to watch anytime, anywhere.

According to Ofcom, nearly half of overall media time is now spent with TV in all its forms. Furthermore, Thinkbox data reveals that almost 40% of screen time is spent on web-enabled devices – demonstrating the scale of those anytime, anywhere TV moments.

Both are something to celebrate because they mean more opportunities for advertisers. That’s because thanks to programmatic technologies, great TV content now comes with the data to allow us to target people at the right time and in the location where messages are most effective.

What we are experiencing is the dawn of a new golden age of cross-screen planning. Optimisation at scale in the most powerful media environment of all – Total TV or TV content wherever and however it is watched – is becoming a reality.

It’s not easy to get this right but the rewards for progressive marketers are huge.

Unfortunately, too many marketers are missing the opportunity to take advantage due to concerns about challenges in the programmatic environment.

Concerns about transparency, talk of black boxes and complex ad tech chains that salami slice budgets, all make it more difficult for marketers to feel confident about using the tools that power the total TV revolution.

It’s certainly true that it’s more challenging to be confident about outcomes when walled garden operators such as Facebook and Google refuse to open their data to third-party verification. Such actions allow the sceptics to build concerns among marketers about whether what they are paying for is being delivered.

This is disappointing because programmatic can deliver huge benefits across the entire Total TV universe, in the shape of smarter planning, targeting and delivery.

Our recent study, conducted by a global marketing foresight consultancy Gain Theory, found that video, deployed in connection with linear TV, delivers on average a positive ROI of 1.27 times higher than just TV in isolation.

It also found – using first party offline sales data over 12 months – that broadcaster video inventory delivers the greatest ROI. No surprise, perhaps, the best content delivers the most engaged consumer.

That’s the short-term lower funnel impact. Screen-neutral planning delivers huge upper-funnel impact too. Nielsen recently published a case study of nine FMCG brands that had experienced a six-fold improvement on brand lift norms when using the Videology platform.

The truth is that such success can be achieved with transparency and without black boxes. Programmatic is a market where it’s possible to select tech partners who will operate in the way that you want them to, to your priorities.

Videology and other tech companies, for example, offer fully flexible BYO deployment. This means a brand can simply use the company as a technology for the media and data it controls, applying its own data and those of third parties as well as bringing its own media (traded direct or via agency deals).

Not just that, but programmatic tools allow brands to optimise according to their key metrics from viewability to completion and sales, tracking what makes the biggest impact for their business. Brands can be as hands on as they like, take control in real time or brief their agency to manage the process.

Total TV is a powerful force, with video complementing linear TV to take overall viewership to an all-time high. Programmatic will power a golden age of television advertising but only if marketers are willing to take advantage of the many screens on which the best content is consumed.

Total TV is the new TV.

For more from Videology head to their blog here.