How soon should we expect to see meaningful uplift from TV advertising? And why isn’t TV attribution part of our evaluation framework? Aviva's Sophie Alexander shares her insights with us following the launch of the latest Aviva Plus TV campaign
Within days of launching our latest TV advert for Aviva Plus: ’Insurance the way it should be’ (check it out in Marketing Week), the normal inquiries of “how is it doing?” started coming my way.
As Aviva’s marketing analytics lead, it is my job to measure the effectiveness of our marketing activities and a large omni-channel campaign such as this naturally attracts attention from all angles.
But just how soon should we expect to see meaningful uplift from TV advertising? And why isn’t TV attribution part of our evaluation framework?
Digitisation of marketing increases impatience for results
Digitisation has conditioned us all to expect to see quick results from digital marketing.
And digitally-minded colleagues have become so accustomed to the speed of results generated by impressions, clicks, digital analytics, and digital attribution, that there’s now a weight of expectation to see the same speed of measurement for above-the-line channels.
When it comes to traditional TV advertising, I am frequently asked to provide measurement results using TV attribution (also known as TV spot-time attribution).
So why do I hesitate? And why wouldn’t I use TV attribution within our evaluation framework?
What is TV attribution?
Simply put, TV attribution is the identification of uplift in phone calls or website visits in the few minutes immediately after a TV advert has aired (i.e. immediately after the spot-time).
TV spot-time matching routines typically use a 5-10 minute window after a TV spot transmission, to attribute any incremental spike in phone call volumes, website traffic or online conversions to that TV spot.
What is digital attribution?
Digital attribution can be explained by way of an over-simplified example:
You see a display advert for the latest gadget. Being a sucker for shiny new gadgets, you click on the advert, and you are taken to the vendor’s website where you cannot resist the urge to go ahead and buy that must-have gadget.
The vendor knows the precise display advert that you clicked on, which brought you to the site to make the sale, and so your sale is attributed to that display advert.
This is an example of ‘last-click attribution’ which is one of the simplest attribution methods to understand and measure; the last click before the user converts is given all the credit for that conversion.
The critical points here are that digital attribution is performed at the individual level, and the advert exposure can be tracked and directly linked to a subsequent conversion, at an individual level (cookie and cross-device limitations excepted of course).
Through cookies and online tracking tools, we know to a high level of accuracy ‘who’ was exposed to which digital adverts, and who subsequently went on to convert online (e.g. make an online purchase).
What are the limitations of TV attribution?
In contrast to digital marketing channels, traditional TV advertising cannot currently be tracked at the individual level.
In the UK, linear TV viewership is currently tracked at the household level by the BARB Panel Establishment Survey – and just 1,000 nationally representative households at that.
Traditional TV advertising, as a broadcast medium, has no mechanism to track which individuals saw which TV advert (and that’s before we even get onto the contentious topic of TV viewability!)
Furthermore, there is no way of linking specific linear TV ad exposures to subsequent conversions.
Therefore, the very term ‘TV attribution’ is somewhat of a misnomer.
Advanced TV has yet to scale
The recent addition of advanced TV is a whole new ball game of course (ie OTT, Connected TV, SVoD, Addressable TV).
These advanced TV mediums herald the advent of addressable TV advertising and true TV attribution at an individual level. But addressable TV has not yet been widely adopted.
Why TV attribution is not TV’s answer to digital attribution
The providers of spot-time TV attribution products appear to have created a product to meet the demands of impatient marketers wanting to see instant results from TV advertising; a way of allowing TV measurement to compete with the speediness of insights obtainable from digital attribution.
But there are two clear reasons why TV attribution is not TV’s answer to digital attribution:
1. TV advertising works very differently to digital marketing
TV is typically considered to be an upper-funnel channel to drive brand awareness and consideration, with a powerful wide reach to the masses.
TV advertising typically brings some short-term impact but also has a much longer-burn and a much longer-term business impact. Therefore it is wrong to just consider the uber-short-term impact in the 5–10 minutes immediately after the TV spot-time.
Granted, spot-time attribution has a place for some Direct Response TV (DRTV), and for some sectors where instant response is the main part of the advert’s objective (e.g. App Downloads, Black Friday sale, impulse buys).
However, when you are in the business of selling a considered purchase (and an arguably low-interest category) such as car insurance, we cannot expect our TV advert to immediately stir the masses into action to buying car insurance from us within the next five minutes.
Not least because, in the car insurance sector, consumers are typically disinterested in buying car insurance for 11 months of the year and would only be susceptible to following the call-to-action if they are in their renewal window – which is very unlikely to be in the next 5–10 minutes!
2. TV buying works very differently to digital media buying
Linear TV buying is typically done several weeks (or months) in advance of the spot time, so it is a long way away from the real-time programmatic buying in the digital marketplace.
There is, therefore, no need to get such quick insights into the impact of TV spot-times like there is for digital media performance.
And perhaps most pertinently, how would you act differently on any insights from TV spot-time attribution in terms of altering your TV buying?
TV buying is a nuanced business and typically the variables such as channel, programming mix, daypart, position in break, etc. are the levers being pulled to achieve reach and ‘share of voice’ targets for your target audience.
Arguably that time would be better spent analysing the TV buying patterns than reviewing the short-term uplift from spot-time attribution.
Only use spot-time attribution if you want to see a reduction in your TV marketing spend!
There is, without doubt, a time and a place for using TV spot-time attribution (eg Direct Response TV), but marketers for Brand TV adverts should be aware of the limitations of TV attribution and understand the pitfalls.
At a time when the marketing industry is struggling to strike the most effective balance between short-term activation and long-term brand building activities, it is easy to see why short-term digital channels are winning larger and larger budgets, taking spend away from their longer-term broadcast media cousins.
We’re hooked on the instant results that you can get from digital campaigns. The fast-paced digital world makes us want everything faster as we get hooked on the drug of getting quick results. By contrast, broadcast media channels are typically a ‘slower burn’ and require more patience and more ‘holding your nerve’ whilst we sit out a longer measurement window.
The effectiveness of digital media is much easier to measure than for above-the-line channels: Digital tracking makes it possible to make the direct link between an ad exposure and conversion at a granular individual level. Measuring linear TV effectiveness, on the other hand, requires an integrated and holistic measurement approach, which takes greater expertise, skill, and patience.
The danger is for TV advertising to get sucked into the short-termism that exists within our industry by us falling into the trap of using spot-time attribution for measuring Brand TV.
The real impact and value of TV advertising go far further than just generating a spike in website traffic in the few minutes immediately after the ad.
Sophie Alexander is marketing performance and insights manager at Aviva and a marketing analytics and marketing effectiveness specialist