Mike Fisher of GroupM shared findings from an eye-opening study conducted with iSpot.tv, investigating continuous play scenarios. It revealed a viewability issue with external, third-party, streaming devices such as Roku, Amazon Fire TV and gaming consoles Xbox and PlayStation. Such devices make the verification of ad delivery via TV apps more difficult. While such a device may signal that an ad was delivered, the TV screen itself may be off. Since external devices and the TVs they are attached to do not talk to each other, and so the message is lost. Fisher urged this as an industry-wide issue that multiple parties: manufacturers, publishers, agencies and advertisers, need to come together to fix.
This dialog between Scott McDonald and Colleen Fahey Rush (Paramount) covered the rebranding of Colleen’s company and three broader issues facing the television industry—the rise of streaming services, her perceptions of the currency environment and the upcoming upfronts.
Justin Evans – Global Head of Analytics & Insights, Samsung Ads
Justin Evans of Samsung Ads uncovered findings from The Streaming Index, a bi-annual white paper Samsung Ads puts out for the marketers of TV apps. The report got its data from its universe of 45 million opted-in U.S. smart TVs, supplemented with an attitudinal survey of 1,000 Samsung smart TV owners from Q4 of 2022. While most studies focus on subscription data, this focused on usage. The number of people streaming TV apps and the time spent watching them has significantly increased year-over-year (Q3 2021-Q3 2022), and yet competition among platforms has grown fiercer. The reason, the churn rate has increased over the past two years. Such a landscape perpetuates a winner-take-most paradigm. TV app marketers should be thinking about ways to acquire a greater share of time and TV app platform providers should focus on loyalty and offering less expensive tiered options, as retained users over-index on time on such apps.
Key Takeaways
The number of average monthly streamers increased 17% year-over-year and the time spent streaming increased 31%.
On linear, 33 channels are viewed by the average user, but the average streaming user only has three to four apps. While changing channels on linear is seamless, changing between content happens more within the app, as changing apps isn’t frictionless. This makes the marketing barrier much greater.
Samsung Ads created a churn ratio which is lapsed users within 12-months divided by active users for the current month. They found that in Q3 2021, the overall churn ratio was 4.8 past users to one current one, while one year later it went up to seven (seven users churned for every one that stayed).
TV apps were divided into three tiers. Tier 1: the top 20% of apps based on average monthly user count, Tier 2: The next 20% based on average monthly user count, Tier 3: the 60% of apps with the smallest monthly user count.
The churn ratio was different depending on what tier a TV app was on. Tier 1 apps in Q3 of 2022 saw a 1.7 churn ratio, tier 2: 3.5 and tier 3: 9.7.
When it came to user share of the average TV app, 23% were new users, 24% returned users and 53% were retained users. With time share, retained users represent 73% of time spent on the average app (new users 14%, returned users 24%).
How can platforms increase retention? Fifteen percent of respondents said a deep library of exclusive content was most important. They also like seeing new content frequently.
Cost is also a factor. Ten percent said they used a platform because it was lower cost than others or free. Twenty-one percent said they would try a new service that was free or low cost. A high cost was also the number one factor of cancelling a streaming service (30%).
The report found a 6% retention rate among hybrid TV apps.
Emily Kwok – Senior Director, Ad Experience Measurement, NBCU
NBCU’s Mike Levin and Emily Kwok tested brand safety in premium video content from a viewer perspective in their research using NBCU’s proprietary AI tech for automating brand safety and suitability decision making. The study’s three objectives asked whether increasingly violent episodes influence viewers’ experiences, if they then assign blame to marketers for knowingly advertising in explicit or violent content, and if there are specific instances where adjacency affects viewer sentiment towards an ad.
Measuring unconscious response to nine episodes across two seasons tagged with three levels of risk, facial coding and eye gaze technology, complemented by traditional surveys, captured the impact on a nationally representative sample of 1,800 respondents.
Finding that violent episodes maintained stable levels of attention, the study also determined that traces of negative emotion were scarcer in the more violent episodes.
Key Takeaways
From the mildest episodes to the most violent, viewer attention remained stable. Attention to high risk episodes measured in at 51.5%, with attention to low-risk episodes at 51.4%.
Viewers don’t attribute blame to advertisers. “There’s more reward than risk,” according to Emily. Viewers tend to enjoy brands that are sponsoring the content they love, controversial or not—8 in 10 agree that they don’t distrust brands that advertise in graphic TV shows.
Several rare cases where gratuitous violence immediately preceding an ad break did carry negative sentiment into the first seconds of the ad.
Lindsey Woodland, Ph.D. – Group VP of Data Science, 605
Jes Santoro – EVP, Advanced TV & Video, Cadent
Lindsey Woodland (605) and Jes Santoro (Cadent) presented a case study of a big box retailer to demonstrate their standardized, scalable process for cross-platform measurement and reporting. The retailer’s 2020 holiday campaign benefitted from the identification, scaling and targeting of a selected custom-curated audience. Activation within premium inventory involved broadcast, cable and CTV ads served to targeted households. Including CTV in the media plan added many medium and light linear viewers.
Measurement and analysis of the campaign indicated that the retailer achieved their campaign objectives, which included acquiring new customers and competitive shoppers, while defending their base of loyal customers. The campaign’s incremental ROAS was $5. Additionally, peak performance for total visits and unique visitors occurred at four exposures. The highest volume of unique visitors occurred within a week after first campaign exposure.
Key Takeaways
It is essential for advertisers to measure the reach and effectiveness across multiple avenues of ad exposure rather than consider exposures in platform silos. The importance of this approach will increase as media consumption continues to evolve and cross-platform consumption grows.
Understanding which targets can not only be reached but also activated by various platforms results in more effective campaign planning.
Based on this knowledge clients can shift dollars between channels to better optimize their campaigns in real time and prior results can be used to inform future work.
Marketers can sub-target their campaigns by creating multiple targets, based not only on media consumption, but also media responsiveness to improve each targets’ projected ad effectiveness.
An effective causal multi-touch attribution (MTA) approach should provide stable, reliable results that have been researched and tested across hundreds of real campaigns and simulated data to ensure that the approach is yielding accurate results.
In this session, Tania Yuki and Brian Pugh of Comscore explored the impact of frequency and latency in cross-platform advertising effectiveness. In her opening, Tania demonstrated consumer trends and touchpoints to better understand cross-media, in terms of reach and optimizing platforms for specific outcomes. In her discussion, Tania acknowledged the challenges of measurement due to the constant introduction of new innovations and the adoption of new behaviors to track. She also recognized the considerable increase in connected devices per household since the pandemic. Tania pointed out complexities in the current media ecosystem from the increase in which media has merged despite being separate platforms (e.g., linear TV, social media, online video, etc.). In addition to all the changing behavior in media consumption, the speaker noted the emergence of Generation Z is beginning to change the rules for establishing brand love and loyalty. In his discussion, Brian examined findings from the measurement of 400 cross-platform campaigns to understand trends in terms of platform mixes. Brian noted the continued growth of social media and CTV along with the decline in linear TV, though he acknowledged linear still remained "king." Furthermore, he found that multi-screen campaigns performed better than single-platform campaigns.
Key Takeaways
The number of connected devices per household has increased from 9 to 12 since the pandemic, creating a more complex path in which to reach consumers.
Despite being separate platforms (e.g., linear TV, social media, online video, etc.) media is “inextricably commingled together,” leading to "context switching and about getting the right content to the right consumer."
In terms of long-form video, "Linear television is still the juggernaut in the room at 205 billion [viewing] hours." Total video across linear, CTV and digital grew 5% year-over-year in the U.S. CTV viewing increased by 14% of the total hours watched.
Short-form video continues to rise in popularity through Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. This trend in short-form video consumption is growing in double-digit percentages and redefining video consumption across mobile and connected TV screens.
The emergence of Generation Z is changing the marketer approach to brand love and establishing loyalty and building long-term value as their consumer behavior is in contrast to previous cohorts. This is specific to their lack of brand loyalty.
In terms of media consumption, Generation Z are heavy movie watchers (37%), preferring dramas (29%) and cooking shows (23%). Additionally, they expressed interest in local news and documentaries.
Social media is still growing (11%) but there are fewer linear TV households (-9%) as people are consuming media elsewhere and CTV has increased substantially (32%).
Though there was a clear decline in linear TV viewership, linear TV remains supreme regarding total viewership for one channel.
In terms of incremental reach over the length of a campaign, linear TV reached a lot of viewers in the early part of a campaign, but over time the study indicated "reaching incremental people on CTV and digital more often." This finding acknowledged the advantages of a cross-screen campaign in terms of optimizing reach.
Adding screens in a campaign improved brand lift but the variability of results also increased. Additionally, results for ad recall and other variables followed a similar pattern. It was noted that the optimal platform mix depended on the target audience.
Tina Daniels – Managing Director, Agency & Brand Measurement Analytics, Google
Nicole Gileadi – Global Product Lead, Google
In this session, Tina Daniels and Nicole Gileadi examined Google's principles for charting the course for third-party cross-media audience measurement. Tina acknowledged more third-party measurement companies were expressing interest in working more closely with Google, given their stature as the world's largest video provider. In her discussion, she acknowledged that this interest generated the need for Google to create a set of principles to offer to both measurement companies and key clients to guide the process. After reviewing these principles Tina and Nicole held an open discussion regarding these principles. Topics of the discussion included premium and high-quality content, long-form versus short-form video and the measurement of this content. In addition, Nicole touched on the importance of content and the context surrounding an ad. Other areas included the idea of exposure metrics (e.g., Where is my audience? Did I reach them?) in addition to providing signals to conduct an impact analysis.
The following are the five principles Google shared with the industry, to act as guidance for third-party measurement companies interested in working with Google:
Google expects measurement companies to be comprehensive, meaning a holistic view of audiences across all platforms.
Measurement should be fair and comparable.
Privacy-centricity is extremely important. Only privacy-centric solutions can meet consumer expectations and be durable for marketers in the long term.
Independent & Trustworthy, meaning both objective and transparent, ideally with third-party endorsement like the MRC.
Measurement solutions must be actionable for advertisers.
Key Takeaways
The struggle that the advertising and marketing industry is currently having is that "there is no universal definition of content quality that is easily measurable in cross-media systems."
"Content quality is being used as this proxy for content impact." For example, "What is the impact of the content on my brand equity, my campaign objective, by marketing or business objectives?" All of these factors are specific to the marketer, the brand and the campaign.
When it comes to exposure metrics, advertisers and marketers should be consistently counting impressions across all channels, "because you need to count things to value them."
Tom Weiss and Megan Daniels of MarketCast introduced a new metric in their break-out session: brand effect resonance. This product evolved from one called Brand Effect which uses a combination of survey (15,000 consumers per day) and behavioral data across linear, social, digital (popular websites) and streaming. First developed by IAG, then owned by Nielsen and then Phoenix, Brand Effect stands as the main engine of the brand-effect resonance rating system, which was created to overcome gaps in reach measurement. They believe it can now isolate and show exactly how content and platform quality impacts advertising performance. Resonance here is defined as how well people remember the ad, how well they understood the creative and the message and how well they can link it back to the brand. Ad resonance measurement is said to be able to isolate the impact of content and platform on ad recall.
Key Takeaways
Reach measurement has drawbacks: even though it acknowledges audience size, it does not measure ad impact. Reach measurement treats all impressions as equal regardless of the content, and while platform and the quality of the content matter, their impact cannot currently be proven.
Ten percent of respondents to a recent MarketCast survey found that in a digital environment, ads associated with premium content (professionally produced vs. user-generated content (UGC)) had more credible messaging.
Sixty-two percent who watched a premium clip remembered the ad and the brand correctly versus 49% of those who viewed a UGC clip. In addition, 56% of premium clip viewers thought the ad spoke directly to them, versus 43% who said an ad in a UGC clip spoke to them.
The resonance score is built from CTV/streaming ACR data, opportunity to see (OTS) surveys for linear TV, tags on digital ads (known exposure) and on social—OTS through memory triggers and surveys.
Using the always on approach, they survey people about ads they have seen on TV, CTV or social within a 24-hour window. The big pool of participants is used to normalize all other factors, so to see what network or platform would best suit a client’s ad.
Ad resonance rating is meant to become an interoperable metric that complements traditional reach and frequency measures and other currency metrics.
