TV is dead. Long live TV.

TV is dead. This is the one line summary of a non-representative survey among my Analyx colleagues (all below 50), exclusively conducted for #WednesdayWhizz 😉: Linear TV plays a minimal role in their life despite higher media consumption during lockdown. Main source of video ad exposure are YouTube pre-rolls and live soccer on PayTV.

Long live TV.

Many forms of digital advertising typically have a substantially higher short-term impact on sales than TV. However, as of today (and I cannot speak of China), no other form of advertising is matching the brand building power of TV.

Consider the following empirical benchmarks from our work at Analyx over the last years: On average, TV ads deliver their short-term sales impact again over the mid-term. We call this BrandMultiplier. If ads are well done (aka sticky) and TV interacts well with other channels, this effect is even amplified (see case study 8!):

On the other hand, we could not find much evidence of a substantial brand building effect for most digital channels. Forget Retargeting, obviously. Forget Display. Forget Generic SEM. BrandSearch is a different animal as it is a tax on awareness that most brands are happy to pay given its high ROI (more on this in a separate post). 

YouTube kills the TV star?

For some brands we work with, OnlineVideo is by now closely trailing linear TV in its ability to create brand awareness. If some well documented rules of the game are followed (e.g. very early brand exposure during the spot), YouTube ads achieve a similar brand multiplier as TV but on a lower overall level of sales impact.

Augustine Fou has published a great framework for rules of thumb on channel tactics. But based on our findings, I would not put OnlineVideo that far on the performance side of the spectrum – together with all other digital channels:

The upshot: Play the upper funnel but watch your back

• Firstly, avoid the hypertargeting trap: (Digital) targeting holds a great promise but you risk "circling in on the few" if you don't take care of your upper funnel:

Advertisers are too focused on hypertargeting individuals that they have UNDER-invested in awareness (upper funnel tactics). They are bombarding the 1% who have bought, and neglecting the 99% who haven't bought yet

-- Prof. Koen Pauwels --

• Like it or not: Once you have reached the "Growth Plateau" from sales activation, you currently have not much choice for growing awareness further (and substantially) than to steadily bet on TV as part of your mix:

• Especially for TV first timers (but not only for those), there is a lot you can do wrong in the execution that sends your precious TV money to waste. Tom Roach’s article might help to avoid many of these pitfalls (For the record: I don’t buy into the TV effectiveness analyses by Mediacom / Wavemaker at the beginning of his post 😉):

• If you have successfully created awareness through TV/OLV, make sure that you properly harvest it downstream. Kodak made the most sticky TV ads for digital cameras but Canon was harvesting the category awareness that Kodak had created. A helpful KPI here might be your own traffic relative to the total search volume of the category (“digital cameras”). 

Last but not least, a somewhat open question for me is still the one prompted by Mirko Caspar last week: If TV is a slowly dying horse, what is the next brand building medium even remotely matching TV’s might? Or is it in the mix which would make proper orchestration and modeling yet more important? All thoughts welcome…