Adam Shalagin, Managing Director at AdMatch and Co-Founder of AdUnion shares his insights into streaming TV media, the new frontier of digital advertising.
We all know marketing is super tough in an environment where both media owners and platforms actively compete for as much of your retail margin as possible.
Sometimes this leaves very little remaining margin for Retailers, with the “market” for customers pushing the price of clicks and CPMs ever higher. Given these market dynamics, the cost of new customer acquisition has been consistently rising. While they have an important role to play, we need to do more than rely on the likes of Google or Meta to build successful and sustainable businesses.
In the past it has been very easy to spend a huge amount on TV or Radio advertising and not quantify the impact, or even feel it at all.
Streaming media is one of the fastest growing channels globally, and Connected TV in particular now presents an Accessible, Targeted and Measurable opportunity.
How TV is both consumed and bought has changed dramatically in the past five years, here in Australia and Worldwide. It has enabled retailers to reach new customers, build their Brands and improve their performance marketing channels.
So how is this now possible?
TARGETED
10 years ago, TV was only available to be purchased as a “Broadcast” medium. In this world, advertisers bought TV Ads that were scheduled in ad breaks at specific times and everyone watching the program saw the Ad. This One Ad Spot was seen by many people, sometimes many thousands or even millions. Media owners like Channel 9 had to sell these spots for the highest price possible, with the most valuable being things like the evening news, which had a big viewership but limited and finite Ad inventory. As an advertiser looking for a specific audience, there was always wastage as you often reached people who were not your target demographic. That said, broadcast still makes sense for large retailers looking for a broad audience.
Today, things are very different. While there is still a large audience on the evening news watching a broadcast, there is regularly 30-50% of a Total TV audience watching a streamed version at a time of their choosing. This number or people steaming is growing every month.
Streaming TV can now be targeted to things like specific location, Gender, Age, time of day, day of week, device – all very digital capabilities.
ACCESSIBLE
There were probably three main things that made TV an exclusive medium for large advertisers only.
Each of these things have now changed dramatically.
- Budget – In the streaming world we show one spot on one TV screen, this means we can reach a defined audience at a much lower cost than broadcast.
- Creative – The days of six and seven figure TV Ads being the norm are now over, with advances in animation, AI and an overall decrease in the cost of production, many Ads we see today are much more cost effective.
- Complexity – Broadcast TV had its own media language (What is a TARP?) and the people you reached was at best, a fair estimate only. Streaming TV as a digital medium is expressed in impressions and CPMs which is the language of digital marketers.
MEASURED
The final piece here is the understanding the ROI for TV. Broadcast media has been notoriously hard to track. We know it works if done well, but it is very hard to measure and demonstrate with hard data. Streaming TV can now be measured in a similar way to other digital media, exactly matched to online sales, even without cookies.
Building a Brand is not easy, but the tools are getting much better!
TV Brand measurement advances have also been significant in recent years as Marketers have become more data focussed and the cost of these services have reduced considerably.
What I love about Streaming Media is that it is a new and imperfect ecosystem.
There is no one dominant player or tech that “owns” the channel, in fact there are lots of competing interests, and new entrants like Netflix… now that represents a huge opportunity for advertisers to win back a degree of influence in what they get for their investments. More on this in my next article.
Words by Adam Shalagin, Managing Director, AdMatch , Co-Founder, AdUnion: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalagin
About Adam: I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in marketing and online for the past 25 years working for retailers like Expedia and eBay, launching AdUnion, a Media Agency and AdMatch, an Advertising Technology Company. Fun Fact – I was running text ads for retail travel agents last century, before Google Ads was even a thing!
Link – https://powerretail.com.au/streaming-tv-media-the-new-frontier-of-digital-advertising/
