“TV’s not declining, it’s just becoming more advanced and redefined,” said Robyn Christison, engagement director at Finecast whose recent collaboration with self-care product manufacturer Perrigo has been a success story of adapting to changing market conditions.
Christison believes there are misconceptions about addressable TV, that it’s all about really niche audiences at a higher price point, the reality is, there are multiple applications of addressable TV that add value and create cost saving opportunities for brands. “Our aim is to simplify the landscape and offer advertisers a single access point to the benefits of the whole ecosystem,” she added.
Increased usage of VOD has been one of the features of the past 12 months. “Some people are only watching TV in this way,” said Eve Thompson, AV media lead at media buyer Wavemaker. “So if we don't operate in this space, if we’re not using addressable, then we will never reach them.”
Channel 4's hit TV series was It's a Sin broke online viewing records for All4 - achieving over 18.9m views. There is a shift in the consumption of live sport too with people increasingly watching via a broadband connection.
Segmentation is not to be sniffed at
Perrigo is a manufacturer of over-the-counter self-care products like Niquitin to stop smoking, Nytol to aid sleep and hayfever remedy Beconase. “Our audiences are quite broad and our products don’t have a specific demographic,” explained Sander Moeyaert, Perrigo’s associated marketing director.
TV has been a successful, reasonably-priced option for Perrigo in the past and they have previously been wary about addressable because of higher entry costs. They challenged Wavemaker to make their campaigns more effective and, therefore, deliver better ROI.
Using addressable, Perrigo have been able to target their hayfever remedies and other allergy brands in a way that would never have been possible with linear. “We targeted areas when pollen was high,” explained Thompson from Wavemaker. “We can put together a mass marketing campaign but one with messaging that targets individual needs. It’s about being more refined, more precise.”
Another of Perrigo’s brands, Niquitin, which helps people stop smoking, was promoted using data segments where the audience targeted was only people who had already decided they wanted to quit.
“You can target groups of households that are most relevant to your brand based on things like lifestyle, life stage and spending habits which makes TV more engaging for the consumer,” added Christison. The activation of first-party data plays a part too in the evolution of segmentation, allowing brands to use their CRM data to serve relevant messages to different customer groups.
Greater effectiveness = greater value
“There are lots of shiny new things out there but it’s important to stay ruthlessly focused on effectiveness,” said Thompson.
“It’s efficient, effective media that we are after,” added Moeyaert. “TV and VOD complement each other. We saw incremental audience growth via VOD for one of our leading brands.”
Initially addressable TV was considered an incremental reach driver, and that's still true. It has proven that it does have the capability to reach much broader audiences, and we can go a step further to create additional efficiencies by managing frequencies from a single access point. “Some of our biggest advertisers use addressable now to target affluent, light users of TV,” said Christison.
Driving low-funnel KPIs
“The key thing is harnessing external triggers,” said Moeyaert. Finecast cited two successful case studies that showed the benefits of addressable. An online alcohol brand saw a 244% increase in sales and a 315% increase in website visits while a pet care brand saw in-store spend per customer rise by 15% with a £3.82 return on ad spend.
Ecommerce exploration
“We really believe in a test-and-learn culture,” said Moeyaert. “We've seen some great results when we link TV with ecommerce sales. And that's definitely a space we want to explore further.”
First-time buyers
Addressable TV’s increased effectiveness has made it much more affordable for new-to-TV brands, such as Perrigo’s skincare product Dermalex, allowing them to test some of the learnings from previous campaigns. “Although economic data shows that TV has the strongest ROI, Finecast gave us an entry point via addressable that is more affordable than the traditional TV advertising,” explained Moeyaert.
The future is NOW
The changing TV landscape offers so many varied and interesting opportunities to advertisers. Linear technologies are advancing to become more addressable, while new entrants to the market (esports and gaming) offer new ways to reach your audience. Other than NOW TV, most SVOD services familiar to UK audiences aren’t open to advertisers yet but ad-funded models will become the norm over time. Christison expects the likes of Roku and Rakuten to “become household names” in the UK.
