Standpoint: Advertising And Your Business Outcomes

While brands digitise their business, it is imperative to understand the impact of their TV advertising on the digital signals By Anubhav Sharma

With brands trying harder to increase their digital presence, it is safe to say that one of the long term shifts that Covid-19 pandemic has brought in  is an acceleration towards digital across industries.

While brands work towards digitising their business, it is imperative to understand the impact of their TV advertising on the digital signals like search volumes, site visits, transactions and app downloads.

Current Challenges

The inability to combine linear reach with business outcomes is going to disrupt broadcasters’ business unless they are embracing the shift. The viewership trends were already changing, and Covid-19 has only added to the momentum. A couple of years ago, the gross rating point (GRP) was the unchallenged king of TV-buying metrics, but advertisers were no longer satisfied with a vanity metrics that only tells a story about reach. They were already experimenting to buy TV ad space in the same manner as digital and measure return on investment in terms of sales and conversions. However, that continues to be largely aspirational in India. 

Another challenge for advertisers is to figure out how many individuals are really exposed to content — or ads — in terms of viewing behaviour over multiple devices per household. Hence, the immediate course of action for advertisers should be to embrace today’s data driven technologies that reveal which TV channels in their media mix are performing better on business metrics.

Right Metrics: Key to Success

New-age measurement and attribution technologies, like SYNC OS platform, are available to help advertisers draw insights into TV-to-online behaviour that can assist in making smarter decisions around online campaigns and help capture the TV driven audience in the best possible manner.

We are also making it possible to identify the keyword searches prompted by TV ads and help in structuring online campaigns to capture this interest. Complex algorithms can measure the baseline of Google search queries and site visits minute-by-minute, track the spikes in site visits and determine how much of this should be credited to TV. This provides access to real-time measurement data to gain accurate insights into the reach, frequency and conversion rates of TV ads right after they air. This way, marketers need not wait for the performance report and make optimisations when almost 80 per cent of the campaign budget is already consumed.

With right measurement metrics, the TV advertising industry as we know, will be changed forever, for the greater good of both advertiser and the consumer.