While TV/CTV campaigns can bring about great benefits to a business, we understand that it may not be the best fit for everyone. As a general rule, there are a few categories for brands that we find would be the best fit for TV/CTV campaigns.
The TV landscape is extremely vast, but extremely reachable. These two factors multiply a brand’s ability to succeed by having a product that speaks to as many demographics as possible.
The size of the meta budget corresponds to the halo effect a brand is capable of achieving on TV. The higher the Meta budget, the more the brand will feel the halo effect of TV.
Marketing a single product in a TV commercial as a challenger brand is the ideal strategy—most consumers can really only grasp one core thing from a TV commercial at a time.
If your brand is able to solve a single pain point with a single product, that is much more effective than touting your entire selection. Consumers have marketplaces like Amazon for scrolling through your catalog, so leave it at that!
With TV and CTV campaigns, you’re sending a lot of new and cold traffic to your site. It is thus pivotal that your website is able to push consumers down the conversion funnels. It should be properly battle-tested prior to testing TV ads to ensure that conversions are optimized.
For us personally, we like to use post-purchase surveys. This is because it’s a less-biased, ultra conservative, and brand-owned data source.
- And above all, patience.
I’ve seen brands try to launch TV ads that start in November to hit Black Friday and the holiday rush—that doesn’t work.
You need time to build familiarity, and frequency on each and every network or streaming provider that you launch on. This is because streaming ad breaks are typically shorter than Linear (cable tv), and frequency takes longer to build on streaming than it does on Linear.
It’s going to take time, it’s going to take patience, and it’s going to take dollars, but the payoff will be worthwhile.
What else should brands know before embarking on such a campaign?
One thing that requires a vastly different strategy relative to how a consumer brand typically operates is the creative aspect of it.
For social media ads, the proper method is to test as many assets as you can possibly create. This is to allow the algorithms to decide how much to spend on each asset. The thought behind it is that the algorithms will act in your best interest based on how well each creative is performing for that platform and your objective.
On social media, the more the merrier—on TV though, it’s significantly different.
On TV, it takes about 1M impressions across the same networks or platforms per asset to understand relative performance of one asset to another—for Linear or streaming. At the outset, testing a single creative is far more costly to test on TV.
For that reason you need a sounder and tighter creative strategy going into TV. This means that you shouldn’t be creating too many assets because the financial risk per asset is much higher.
You’ve invested in your first TV/CTV campaign—how should you go about measuring its efficacy?
How do you do attribution for TV/CTV?
Household uses a few different attribution methods.
The first way is the Tatari dashboard for next day measurement.
Tatari measures top of the funnel performance which includes cost per visitor, response rate, and more. It is also able to measure bottom of the funnel performance, inclusive of conversions, cost per acquisition, and so on.
This helps us get an understanding all the way down to the creative assets. We can analyze down to how the ads are performing and at what specific time of day. Tatari’s measurement tools not only help us understand how spending has affected previous performance, but also helps us project how previous spending affects future performance.
The second (and lesser-known) method is to use a post-purchase survey.
Post-purchase surveys are purely the brand’s zero-party data, and are therefore less biased. It also happens to be a conservative measure of what has occurred in the past only.
It’s ultra-conservative to us because survey data does not incorporate any projection into how past spend will affect future performance. Customer reported post-purchase survey data is a very important tool for us to help rebalance media plans, and plan for brands.
How does it compare to other media formats?
For a platform like Meta, attribution feels fairly clear. It is able to provide instant feedback on what has previously occurred.
Looking backwards is how most DTC brands are structured, and how we are all comfortable thinking. However, with TV, it is just as important to look forwards.
Your business needs to look at the projected impact of your spend and how it’ll be 2 weeks or a month down the line. This is to help you understand the impact of what your media spend on TV has already yielded.
CTV vs TV attribution
What platform-reported sources are there?
There are third-party agency platform reporting tools like Tatari, who is a Household partner.
They do a good job of helping you understand different measurement durations; 1-day view-through (1DVT), 7-day view through (7DVT), and Incremental are popular ways to look at CTV measurement.
Do you rely on pixels, coupon codes, etc?
We do not rely on coupon codes because the majority of consumers can really only remember one thing about a product or brand that they see on a commercial. We’d prefer to use our energy in the creative to get the consumer to remember the single most important point of the brand.
Pixels are helpful in tracking attribution from third-party platforms, but they can have some bias (in our opinion) towards whatever platform is running the pixel.
How does that data fit into a brand’s attribution model?
Some brands will include it in their marketing mix model (MMM) studies, and others use it more directionally.
The accuracy of the data improves with more data points. So typically, if there is not enough data for statistical significance, brands will look at it directionally.
What is the difference between CTV and TV attribution?
The main difference between Linear and Streaming TV ads is how they air on TV.
Streaming ads air on-demand as someone is watching, impression by impression, one by one. Linear TV ads air all at once, to everyone watching the same program at the same time.
Because of this, attribution is vastly different. Linear TV attribution is based on a spike measurement: how many visitors did the commercial drive? This is measured by the baseline of website visitors in real-time and is compared to the 5-minute period after an ad has been aired on Linear (cable) TV.
The difference between those two numbers is the ‘lift’ from that specific spot. CTV can use pixels to track users from the ad airing to that same person visiting a website. Some would say CTV is more precise, but when we think about TV media buying, we will always trade tracking and precision for audience size and price.
What is the halo effect of TV and what is a great way to measure it?
To us, the halo effect of TV is best discussed in how it affects the other marketing channels.
As TV drives so much additional traffic through search, it has a huge effect on Google and social media channels such as Meta as well. The goal is that by increasing incremental traffic not found on those other channels, it will improve the overall efficiency of all channels—much like a rising tide that lifts all boats.
To help measure this, we like using Fairing’s secondary question tool which allows you to ask follow up questions. For example, if someone answers ‘How did you hear about us?’ with ‘Facebook or Instagram Ad’ we will also ask them ‘Did you also see a TV Commercial?’ and vice versa. This helps us understand how the channels work together.
So far, we have seen about a 10-20% halo from Instagram → TV, and 20-30% halo from Facebook → TV.
When we activate these questions from our launch on TV, this helps us adjust budgets. Not only that, but also understand the effect of TV and how it relates to Facebook and Instagram over time.
