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Do TV and Streaming Ads Drive Sales?
Tracking full-funnel attribution for TV and streaming ad campaigns is mission critical
TV advertising has long been a must-buy for brands, as it drives growth in their customer base and overall business. And for good reason: Consumers are 42 percent more likely to say TV was how they first discovered a new brand compared to social media, according to a Comcast Advertising survey of 1,000 viewers.
While marketers know multiscreen TV — both traditional and streaming — drives brand awareness, it has seldom been easy to demonstrate its direct influence on sales and business outcomes. Amid the expansion of social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and data, brand marketers need to prove the value of their TV media spending just as they do with their digital campaigns. In the current marketing climate, tracking deep, full-funnel attribution for TV and streaming campaigns should be non-negotiable for brands. It all comes down to working with the right partner.
Comcast Advertising has worked with several measurement and data providers to ensure advertisers are seeing how their ad investments are driving consumer actions. Against the backdrop of a fiercely competitive business environment, here are three tips for CMOs and marketers who are eager to apply digital-style measurement to their TV and streaming strategies.
1. Expect More Than Awareness
TV's ability to bolster reach and build brand awareness cannot be denied. Awareness is still crucial, but marketers are looking for campaigns that perform throughout every stage of the sales funnel. According to Comcast Advertising, 76 percent of advertisers say driving final consumer actions — often resulting in sales — is important.
The key is proving that ads lead consumers to purchase. Thanks to advancements in data accuracy, it's now easier than ever for advertisers to use technology to link ad exposure to tangible outcomes such as store visits, sales, and more.
For example, technology company Blockgraph was able to measure the value of TV advertising for a regional mattress store by looking at how the campaigns fueled actual consumer spending. In one quarter alone, the campaign drove more than $6 million in sales, resulting in a 13.5 times return on ad spending (ROAS). The analysis was also able to show which tactics were the most effective in driving conversions across traditional, streaming, and addressable strategies, enabling brands to better optimize their budgets and focus on the most effective tactics.
2. Dig Deeper
For those marketers diving into the TV-attribution waters, it is important to understand that not all attribution is created equal. The most reliable insights come from attribution built on first-party data, deterministic signals or authenticated information linked to a consumer or household such as physical address.
At a minimum, marketers should be able to see the ROAS for each campaign. But the real value for brands lies in delving deeper, to glean insights into a specific audience or geography and gain a detailed understanding of how and when advertising is spurring spending behaviors or causing consumers to make a purchase.
Auto marketing and measurement technology company Clarivoy, for instance, was able to demonstrate the direct sales attributed to a campaign for an auto dealer and provide insights about its customers' behavior, as well. The analysis showed the journey the auto dealer's customers took, from viewing a TV ad to checking out automotive marketplace sites to making a purchase.
Providing an extra level of insight is invaluable to a brand marketer managing a budget: It not only tells them where their dollars go furthest, but also what is driving the most audience action among actual consumers.
3. Keep It Simple
Many marketers assume that getting attribution from TV requires complex pixeling or heavy data integrations. Not true. It can be a straightforward exercise.
By partnering with Mastercard, Comcast Advertising was able to connect ad exposure to spending without the need for a pixel by analyzing TV ad-exposure data to geographically aggregated spending. One example showed that a grocery chain drove 19 times ROAS and $152 million in incremental sales for the duration of the brand's TV advertising campaign.
The ability to connect ad exposure to geographically aggregated spending gives a cost-effective way for advertisers to obtain attribution reporting without investing in complex back-end infrastructure updates — while providing invaluable insights into advertising performance. At a time when reaching fragmented consumers is more challenging than ever, being able to easily tap into robust details on how TV advertising is driving not only awareness, but also action, gives brand marketers a simple way to understand what works.
Redefining Attribution
TV is no longer just a top-of-funnel play. It's a full-funnel powerhouse, and attribution tools continue to prove it. Leaders in premium multiscreen TV have redefined attribution for the medium and ensured that marketers can confidently measure the returns of their TV investments, optimize their media mix, and make smarter decisions across media planning and buying.
Comcast Advertising is a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.
