Topic: Data

For the auto industry, TV advertising has traditionally always been about reach. Manufacturers and dealers use TV, radio, newspapers, and most recently, digital, to catch anyone in the market for a car and share their message.

But the last decade has brought change to the industry from all sides. Demand has evolved as environmental concerns and rising gas prices turned buyers away from gas-guzzling SUVs toward high-tech hybrid and electric cars. The buying audience has changed, too. Millennials — who delayed buying cars, along with having kids and buying houses, because of other financial pressures after the 2008 recession — tend to live in urban areas where cars are less of a necessity and more of a pain. Car-sharing and ride-sharing, plus whispers of a driverless-car future, are extending the already-long sales cycle and making it unsustainable for businesses and manufacturers.

With these challenges comes a new chance to refine how auto manufacturers and dealers market to consumers. The rise of technology and the evolution of TV have introduced more opportunities to better connect with potential buyers in the right place with the right message at the right time. Using data-driven addressable TV to target TV ads at the household level along with wider-reach cable and broadcast campaigns, marketers can take advantage of a new era of auto advertising.

Marketing in the auto industry

First, let’s look at the way that sales are made in this industry. Different tactics are employed to connect with different levels of the consumer consciousness. 

The manufacturer markets for broad brand awareness by tying its product to an emotional appeal. If you want to keep your family safe, you’ll buy this brand. If you want to embrace the fun of life, you’ll buy this brand. These messages are traditionally sold on a large-scale, national TV level, hitting every home television agnostically.

But with the growth of non-traditional TV (including VOD and OTT) watched on multiple devices, it’s making it difficult to capture an effective reach or ROI at each tier. As a result, brands and dealerships cut back on their TV ad spend: a recent forecast put auto ad spending growth at 0.8% (down from 1.5% in 2018) across the world. They then overcorrect and spend more on digital, where competition for consumer attention makes it harder and more expensive to impactfully reach the right audience. 

The shift is unsustainable: There needs to be a balance between one-to-one targeting and mass brand awareness across TV and digital, as well as on every tier.

Maximizing dollars in a slowing market

By using the full TV ecosystem–broadcast, cable and addressable–as part of omnichannel marketing campaign, auto marketers can make the most of their advertising investments. 

The auto industry is a very competitive, dynamic marketplace. After conversion, a customer won’t be in-market for a vehicle for several years. This means marketers need the latest, freshest look at who’s in-market for a car, and they need a clear understanding of ROAS and who converted, which addressable TV advertising can provide.

Addressable TV offers precise, household-level targeting at scale, allowing marketers to reach exact segments of viewers wherever they are watching TV. Manufacturers can reach people who already own models of their cars or people who own competitive vehicles. In practice, one luxury auto manufacturer saw a 37% lift in buy rate by those who were exposed to addressable advertising compared to those who were not, along with a $9.48 incremental ROAS for every TV media dollar spent.

In combination with wide-reaching national manufacturer campaigns and local broadcast campaigns by specific retailers, TV reemerges as a highly competitive and data-driven medium. What’s more, by pairing data-driven television with digital marketing and experiential campaigns, marketers in the auto industry will make more personalized, targeted and smart customer connections that will pay off in the long run.

The auto industry–and its marketing–have evolved. While consumers are becoming harder to reach, advanced TV has found ways to connect with them in more relevant and impactful ways.

Learn more about Cadent Advanced TV Platform, and get in touch with us today.

There’s no better predictor for which TV shows a household will watch than understanding what they’ve already watched. However, there’s still a ton of waste with TV tune-in ads. We’ve all seen commercials for shows that we have no intention of ever watching. These waste the viewer’s time and the programmer’s money.

Since the case is simple, tune-in was the pioneer category to leverage addressability. Smart use of set-top-box viewership data paired with MVPD partnerships means ads for TV programming can be targeted to viewers with more precision than ever before, at scale. Addressable ads are dynamically served whenever and wherever a targeted household is watching, therefore eliminating wasted dollars.

At one2one Addressable, we know using multiple platforms provides scale, and we know scale is necessary to drive ratings. With our MVPD partnerships, we use best practices for a holistic approach to tune-in campaigns offering programmers an aggregate view of targeting consumers watching desired content across multiple systems.

While operators own the inventory, understanding how to best leverage data across each platform offers a huge value to the programmers. And as media consumption and engagement continues to change, marketers must keep up and ensure they’re using the right tactics to find true target viewers.

If You Liked That, You May Like This

Set-top-box viewership is one of the most powerful data sets to use for data-informed campaigns, particularly in the entertainment category. One2one Addressable has executed more than 1,000 tune-in campaigns across network genres, around 85% of which have leveraged STB data for targeting.  

By understanding the personalized viewership habits of each household, we can segment audiences based on a variety of attributes: light viewers, lapsed viewers, competitive viewers, or more broad genre-focused like documentary viewers, reality TV viewers, or live sports viewers. We can work with the suppliers to target uniquely-defined audience segments from the onset of the campaign and can then analyze the conversion differences by audience with back-end measurement. This can help inform the programmer of which audience segments are easily convertible vs. harder and therefore where more investments should be made across all media tactics.  

However, there are other viable sources for finding valued audiences – beyond a household’s set-top-box viewership data. For the other roughly 15% of tune-in campaigns executed, audiences have been determined by using psychographic behaviors through third-party data sets or even a programmer’s own first party data. Or, in some cases, we’ve overlayed STB data with those other data sets.  

On the other hand, in the case of a new premiere or tentpole event, programmers may cast a wide net to raise awareness, employing high-impact ads, out-of-home stunts, and content sponsorships to gain mindshare. Complementing those efforts with addressable support would guarantee increased frequency against the target. But what happens when we’re not sure who the target is?

Standard media planning tools provide a solid understanding of networks and programs the “should-be” audience is likely watching. But as the line between digital and television continues to blur, social data, for instance, can provide a wealth of insights. Nothing would be more valuable than finding people that are already actively engaging with the event topic or subject matter. For example, for a live musical event, a network could target people who tweeted about Broadway or a particular actor set to star in that televised event.

While the obvious goal of any programmer is to see positive conversion results to increase ratings, defining the addressable KPIs in relation to the holistic media plan during the planning process is a crucial factor to creating the campaign’s test design and understanding which targeting tactics would be most beneficial.

Measuring the Payoff

Once the campaign’s objectives are clearly defined and the campaign airs, how do we measure success? By evaluating each MVPD’s tune-in conversion results, we’re able to unify and report on the true value of the addressable campaign’s impact on the overall program performance.

In one example, for a returning season, a one2one Addressable campaign prompted an aggregated 67% lift in conversion comparing test vs. control target households, equating to over 1.6M converted households and 438,000 incremental households that would not have converted without the incremental addressable frequency. Additionally, the same campaign netted a 19% lift in conversion to subsequent airings of the program after the media support concluded thus proving sustained media effectiveness against the exposed audiences.

All analytics are presented in an interactive reporting dashboard which provides clients with standardized metrics and insights regarding campaign performance. The dashboard takes into account volume, conversion rates, percent of lift, conversion volume and how the factors work together to impact overall rating therefore providing necessary data to calculate a return on ad spend (ROAS). With conversion details, we can understand the dayparts, days of week, and networks that provide strongest performance for the programmer that can be applied to future campaigns across all media strategies.

We show programmers an overview of the campaign with transparency and make sense of the addressable tactics across the various systems, versus looking at each operator in a silo. This demonstrates overall impact on the promoted program or brand and how targeting an audience with increased frequency can influence results.

Beyond the Basics

There are a ton of learnings beyond tune-in conversion we can learn from an addressable campaign’s performance, especially on the digital side. For instance, the programmer may store content on their website, and in addition to driving program ratings, they may hope to increase web engagement. Working with a data partner, we could pixel the site to tie the household exposures back to web traffic. From there, the programmer may want to understand the audience segmentation of those going on their site, asking about demographics and the companies and brands that spark an audience’s online behaviors. At that point, we may opt to do a social study to further understand which brands will resonate stronger with that programmer’s content. Knowing that may help the programmer’s sales force prospect advertisers to further monetize their television inventory.

Implementing an addressable tune-in campaign presents us with an abundance of executional options. Once we’re able to clearly define the campaign objectives and necessary diagnostic data cuts, the measurement details could provide irreplaceable value to the programmer. By removing the waste, increasing frequency against high-value households and understanding best practices against all supply platforms, the granular analytics can be a key component of a program’s success. With each day, there are new targeting and measurement opportunities, even for the pioneer addressable category. Stay tuned for what’s to come.

Get more information on one2one Addressable. 

Every year, the Cannes Lions brings the advertising industry together to celebrate the best and most innovative creative in the world. Over the last couple of years, data and technology have been added to the mix – giving the industry hope that we can add more impact to advertising by bringing all three elements together.

The Cadent team was at the festival this year (you might’ve seen our banner in front of the Carlton Hotel, visible from the Croisette). Cadent Network President Jim Tricarico spoke on an advanced TV panel at the CMO ClubHouse, and CEO Nick Troiano and CMO Paul Alfieri talked to Cynopsis about why Cannes is such a valuable event for our industry.

The Lions are, of course, a great way to take the pulse of the industry and hear diverse perspectives about where the industry is headed.

Here are a few takeaways we heard:

• The current television ad model needs to be reinvented. The industry should come together and push for more unified standards, including the definition of an impression, in order to evolve and not lose out to the social giants and walled gardens of the world. New challenges like increased ratings pressure, inflationary pricing and audience fragmentation call for evolved methods of targeting and measurement. Change won’t happen overnight, but the industry is moving in this direction.
• OTT and ACR are the future of TV. Linear models need to be reconsidered to remain relevant. Automatic content recognition or ACR data will revolutionize the industry. In the past five years, the number of over-the-top (OTT) only households has tripled to 14 million. TV is going through a major transformation, and it’s up to the industry to decide how and when that transformation progresses.
• Data, Data & More Data. Brands and agencies are stressing the importance of strategically building plans against audiences and garnering deeper post-campaign analytics and insights. Currently, the industry lacks the expertise to really drive the marketplace forward, and a different, more data-driven skillset may be needed. At Cannes, we heard that data is influencing the creative and campaign design processes and driving a more “test, iterate, evolve” approach to campaigns. Modern marketing requires an analytical mindset and a drive all aspects of campaign, from TV performance to messaging. The industry needs to continue automating processes so we can be more flexible in an iterative world constantly looking to improve.