Watch What Happens When We Cross Digital Video Insight With TV

It’s no secret that TV is a powerful medium for advertisers. Neustar’s latest research shows that for a $1 million investment, television’s lift is consistently seven times better than paid search and five times better than online display advertising.

These numbers are great, but I think they will improve over time as new options in addressable TV—a method of delivering highly targeted advertising to individual households—allow advertisers to upgrade their traditional TV ads using data from digital video outcomes to produce better results on both screens.

As for the opportunities for marketers to execute cross-screen campaigns, I see brands and agencies transitioning to a single “video” campaign framework to better synergize and tell stories across all screens. Today, this approach allows marketers to use real-time insights and knowledge from real-time digital video executions to impact their television campaigns that require a little more lead time. But eventually, the ability to optimize in real time will come to television as well.

Many advertisers today run advanced TV and digital video campaigns separately, even if they target the same audiences. This is because of the silos that still exist on marketing teams and agencies, which are working with separate budgets and goals, with little to no visibility into how they can work together. In addition, most video marketing partners can only execute on one screen—TV or digital—specializing in how to engage in either a lean-forward digital environment where they are choosing to engage or a lean-back viewing state while they watch TV at home in a relaxed atmosphere. As a result, brands are limited in their ability to tie the two together for better insights, which is what they can and should be doing.

Perhaps the most overlooked key marketing campaign is creative personalization. Today, digital video allows for unlimited numbers of personalized versions that enable marketers to customize communication based on the viewer, making the message more relevant. This goes beyond a user’s demographics to include what platform they are on, the time of day, the viewer’s location, current activity, and stage of the purchase funnel. Addressable TV is providing a stepping stone for personalization on television, allowing dozens of versions so that marketers can better target on the household level with relevant advertising. It’s a start.

The future of addressable TV advertising lies in the ability for television to not only function more like digital, but almost exactly like digital—enabling marketers to maximize the outcomes driven from cross-screen activations. In this world, marketers would have more visibility and influence over cross-screen campaigns, with the ability to target, personalize, measure, and optimize creative and outcomes across all executions—regardless of which screen they’re viewed on. Frequency and creative sequencing would also be under consideration in this scenario.

Having a single video campaign where you can apply creative optimizations across all screens and devices will ultimately allow for more flexibility and precision in reaching a greater outcome and more sales.

To get here, we, as an industry, must continue to break down the walls between digital and TV so we can derive learnings about what creative and messages work best across a singular campaign and apply those insights in real time.

As most digital-based media has transitioned to a more relevant targeting and messaging approach, TV has lagged behind. We know TV drives great ROI but is still primarily bought for broad reach and awareness. The future of advertising is in delivering more relevant, targeted messages across screens, and bringing digital and TV advertising together as a singular unit will be the answer.