We’ve written about lessons the video industry could learn from their traditional partner and competitor, the TV industry. What would these lessons look like in reverse? As more advertisers try to balance their spending between these two similar-but-different ad formats, what lessons can the TV industry and advertisers take away from video advertising? Here are four insights:
The Need for More Precise Measurement Tools
The TV industry has long had its own system of measurement built around metrics like GRPs and TRPs. While this has worked just fine for advertisers and networks, it’s gotten trickier in the era of video measurement. Video advertisers today can fall back on a wealth of metrics related to details like click through, conversions, ROI, completion rates and beyond. Expect to see TV evolve to incorporate more data that helps advertisers understand performance around these metrics.
Flexibility Is Critical to Optimize Performance
Even though it’s possible to get TV campaigns on-air quickly, it’s not quite as easy to make adjustments once they’re live. One of the advantages for advertisers with video campaigns is the ability to make real-time adjustments. Is the ad creative not performing how the client hoped? Is the target audience reacting better to one version of an ad over another? Video excels at giving advertisers the ability to test and change creative in real-time. That said, TV is also adapting: just look at programmatic TV for evidence.
Advertisers Want More Granular Targeting
Connected to the point above, video (and programmatic) advertising have opened up a new world of targeting options for advertisers. Video campaigns are now able to get granular in delivering pinpoint ad campaigns, reaching consumers around specific mindsets, interests and demographics. While this is already possible to some degree with TV, more advertisers are demanding to see these same detailed targeting options across all of their TV campaigns.
Together Is Always Better Than Alone
Video has driven home an important point for advertisers, helping to show that campaigns running across multiple devices like smartphones, desktops and tablets are more effective than only choosing one over the other. This same point applies when pairing video ads with TV campaigns. As IAB research has demonstrated, the combination of TV and video advertising together creates a “multiplier effect,” improving TV campaigns’ overall brand lift and recall in a way that wouldn’t be possible if the creative only ran on TV.
As the recent surge in programmatic TV has illustrated, the TV industry has already learned plenty of lessons from the video industry. Expect the benefits of these two different formats to blend ever-more closely together in the years ahead.