“I was looking at forecasts yesterday that said there isn’t going to be a month between now and the end of 2023 in which the price of TV advertising doesn’t go up.” Gareth George, head of media at Confused.com explained to an audience at the Campaign TV Advertising Summit 2022.
George was speaking at a panel discussion, in partnership with Samsung Ads, called The Business Case For TV Advertising – How To Measure And Maximise Your TV Spend To Deliver Value.
“ROI is flat,” George went on to say, “but price is going through the roof. We, brands, have to react to that. We have to be cleverer in the way we plan, buy and measure. There’s also a role for the creative teams. Because if you’re buying fewer ads… make the ads better, so they are more effective.”
“There’s a case for [linear] TV advertising, for now,” said Lois Wright, brand marketing manager for Premier Inn. “It’s been that classic thing of, every now and then, thinking maybe we should just try digital only. Then after 18 months, you realise [some] metrics are starting to wane. For Premier Inn, we need to be front of mind all the time. But it is also measurement that helps deliver that continual investment in TV. We always talk about search and TV being related; when you use TV, you see your [search] conversions increase and improve.”
Finding ways to make blended linear and on-demand advertising better, by using the advantages of working across both linear and video-on-demand, was a theme through the day. Samsung’s head of CTV platform sales Chris Kleinschmidt used data from a range of premium food-delivery brands to make his point.
Around 45% of Samsung smart TV owners, he explained, watch under three hours of linear television a month. It is extremely difficult for brands using traditional TV media-buying strategies to reach them. By switching from a traditional media plan to one that takes an integrated approach across linear and programmatic video, you can overcome this challenge.
Trust and opportunity
Panel member Jake Dubbins, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, pointed out that, particularly at a time of rising prices, streamed content gives brands of all sizes TV options. “Fragmentation is an opportunity for those brands,” he said. “If you take a brand such as the vegan egg substitute Crackd, that would never normally be able to afford to get on your TV screen. But thanks to streamed content, it was recently Sky’s best-performing advertiser for brand awareness.”
Kleinschmidt emphasised the importance of data and privacy, if advertisers are going to realise the full potential of on demand and streaming environments. Smart TVs, he explained, can provide advertisers with a wide range of data on households, from geographical location, down to channels, programmes and apps watched, through a combination of device data and Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data. Importantly, households can update their data and privacy preferences in our Privacy choices app, at any point.
But for brands to make use of that data, consumers must opt in. That requires trust. And you can only build trust if you have robust and transparent privacy standards. Given that, within four or five years, 90% of Britons will have a smart TV, the industry needs to start creating these standards now.