The internet's capacity to produce results on the effectiveness of an ad has led to something of an obsession with new forms of measurement.
And now with Smart TV’s becoming smarter, it's now possible for advertisers to view TV audience data through a filter akin to online.
Measuring TV ads with an online metric would be a big advancement for the industry, especially as it means better targeting for the consumer as they are served ads that fit them and their lifestyle. The knock on effect is that greater relevance delivers greater engagement - which means less wastage.
Less wastage means a higher ROI, and soon we can track who engages with the ad by going on the website or requesting more information on a certain product (see Think TV’s ‘2020 Vision’ series with Mark Holden).
Personally I’m looking forward to it – If ‘that’ Tampon ad is replaced with something I can relate to I’ll be a happy man.
We are seeing the beginning of this already with our changing viewing behaviour where we source content for ourselves. Our TV viewing habits have been moving away from an ‘appointment to view’ basis to ‘content on demand’ for some time.
This was highlighted a few weeks back when ABC’s iview saw record numbers watching the new Doctor Who season which was made available only a few hours after being first aired in the UK.
Game Of Thrones is another example – hours after it first aired in the US it was being torrented illegally, many of those downloads coming from Australia.
Consumers are no longer willing to wait for their content.
Will the FTA networks soon be forced to run key programming straight after it airs overseas so as not to lose audiences? If so, what impact will this have during the summer break when ‘non survey’ periods come into play?
By the time survey periods resume most people would have seen the remainder of their favourite series online, legally of course.
Consumers will still watch scheduled TV, but are currently consuming it more when other people are watching it – The Olympics are an example of this.
So too is any locally produced content such as The Voice because it goes to air as soon as it has been edited, and (part of it) was live which makes it very hard to catch up when everyone is talking about it at work the next day.
It only makes sense to combine different forms of data to better understand our consumer. Using one metric is now only giving you a bit of information, but when combined with other measurement metrics it has the ability to tell a very true and very powerful story.
‘Big Data’ is becoming more readily accessible and we all have access to this data through tools like Nielsen Fusion. What will differentiate the approach to market is how we analyse and interpret this data. Where we place our media will become more important as audiences fragment, but quality of content will also become far more important if we are to grab the consumer’s attention.
‘Number of people reading’, ‘number of people watching’ etc. will always be a valuable way to measure a campaign's success, but with these advancements in measurement, ‘number of people who engage’ is also becoming a very important metric – and one we can now measure more accurately than ever before.
Andrew Drinkell
Media Buyer
MEC