In the advertising world, perhaps not even “Mad Men” is as consistently entertaining as The Martin Agency. Known for steady and creative execution of Fortune 500 accounts, Martin helped bring GEICO out of the stone age (or into it, rather) with its caveman campaigns, and re-energized Walmart’s image with a clean and modern approach.
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In just a few short years, DVRs and video-on-demand have dramatically altered how television is watched. In 2006, fewer than two percent of households owned a DVR. Now, more than half do. The use of DVRs has changed along with market-growing penetration. Instead of just being time-shifters, many viewers are effectively becoming collectors, stockpiling so many shows on their DVRs that they don’t have time to watch them all. As a result, they’re also watching shows later, at a time when it’s convenient to them.
As The New York Times reported recently, this fall’s television season saw a surge of viewers watching shows four to seven days after the initial air-date. Broadcasters and cable networks typically base their ad prices on so-called C3 ratings or the amount of viewership over the course of three days of delayed viewing, and view those later impressions as effectively uncompensated.
TargetCast has had great success as an agency helping its clients navigate these churning media waters. I sat down with Audrey Siegel, TargetCast’s Agency President, to discuss how shifting viewing habits have changed how TV advertising is sold and used.
It is certainly true that increased consumer control over multiple aspects of their viewing behavior has forever changed the medium at its core. The ability to time-shift viewing is really the tip of the iceberg. We must now add to time-shifting the viewer’s ability to platform shift, to actually change the location of their viewing as well as the time in which they view a particular program. In effect, dayparts are becoming intensely personal; “my primetime” supplants generic primetime. The language around the nature of the viewing experience – at-home, lean-back, me time – must now recognize mobile as well as multiscreen viewing. All of this viewing, ultimately, will be wrapped in the cloak of digitized delivery, of both ads and programming, and will open up television advertising opportunities for addressable messaging and dynamic creative versioning. This ultimately will make our most mass medium most personal, promising greater viewer engagement and potentially greater brand engagement as a result.
Tracking the effectiveness of TV advertising has long been a promise unfulfilled. We have settled for surrogates – such as program engagement, ad awareness, and commercial ratings – but in fact have not been able to directly connect television advertising with marketplace effectiveness in the most direct manner. The increasing digitization of the video medium, as well as the multi-screen nature of program and ad delivery, brings us closer to the realization of effectiveness metrics. In addition, as we build more complex multi-channel attribution tracking and modeling applications, we will better understand not only the effectiveness of one video channel, (television) but its impact on, and relationship with, other video elements (mobile, online) as well as other messaging channels (search, social).