Neil Mortensen, Research and Planning Director, Thinkbox
‘So long silos, hello understanding’
The recent spate of organisations – including BARB and Google – planning to track TV viewing across platforms are a sign that platforms are less important than content and functions. It also represents, I hope, another nail in the coffin for the misuse of the word ‘digital’ in advertising and the blunt lumping together of the wide spectrum of online marketing opportunities under its enormous banner.
Thinkbox has long called for the industry to talk about distinct online marketing activities – search, classified, display, email – on their own merits now that they are mature. It was useful to lump them together once, but surely not now. At best the misuse of ‘digital’ has been confusing (TV, radio and newspapers are digital media too, yet digital is often set up as their opposite); at worst it has been misleading and a reinforcement for the silos we are supposed to be breaking down.
There is no reason to talk in silos anymore. TV and many online media fulfill different but important and complementary roles for advertisers. They are best used together.
The IPA’s latest effectiveness tome underlines this point. ‘Datamine 3: New models of marketing effectiveness. From integration to orchestration’ is based on an analysis of the IPA’s databank of over 250 case studies of effectiveness from 2004 to 2010, and it demonstrates once again the vital role TV plays in driving marketing effectiveness. More importantly, it makes clear the fact that multichannel campaigns drive incremental effectiveness over and above single channel ones.
So we have hopefully reached the moment when we talk about and examine media in a sensible, integrated way.
In terms of TV, the efforts being made to measure its consumption across platforms is the Holy Grail for advertisers. TV behaviours have been developing at a rapid pace in recent years as technologies have enhanced and liberated TV content. We live in an increasingly two-screen world (watching TV with a companion internet-enabled device to hand) and our Tellyporting research showed that 37% of UK households who have digital TV and broadband engage in ‘two-screening’ every day. It is not ‘normal’ behaviour yet, but it will be in the near future.
Advertisers and agencies want one metric that shows them the total reach of their broadcast TV and online TV campaigns with the rigour and granularity they have come to expect from BARB. The key for all of us in the media industry is to understand how to create content to fit snuggly with the new behaviours, and how to integrate brands into this evolving landscape. We need to understand when to have a conversation with consumers, when to interrupt them (with something exciting) and when to let them come to us.
Happily, this urgent need to better understand what people actually do is increasingly recognised. Rory Sutherland used his time at the helm of IPA to hammer home the importance of behavioural economics and the giants of Silicon Valley have finally awoken to the possibility that a ‘click’ may not be the be all and end all.
The likes of ComScore and UKOM have accelerated their activity in recent years, building and refining online panels in an attempt to fill the gap in understanding. The market has been calling for many years for some sort of indication of who is actually pressing the mouse - rather than how many times - and what actually led them to press it in the first place.
The stakes are high. The amount of revenue apportioned to marketing activity on the Internet has been the significant growth story of the last decade. And this has been powered by call to action and search marketing. But where to now for these technology companies? The answer is that as platform neutrality beckons the big fish all want to reel in the highly-prized TV content that is now swimming through their waters.
The latest initiative to get the industry buzzing is Google’s much talked about, multi-million pound planning tool aimed at helping brands understand consumer behaviour across TV and online media platforms. Google joins others on path, not least BARB.
BARB is already a long way down the road to providing the Holy Grail of TV measurement. Internet-delivered TV viewed on TV sets (whether via games consoles, connected TVs or just a laptop plugged into the TV set) has been part of the main BARB numbers since January 2010. After a year-long test project, it is now taking a major step towards the measurement of television viewing on PCs, laptops and tablet devices with the initial rollout of a web TV viewing meter in homes during the second half of this year.
When it comes to truly understanding the complete picture for professionally produced TV content and its consumption across platforms, BARB is likely to set the gold standard in measurement. It will be a fully representative set of single source data that will allow the industry to continue to plan and buy television (in all its guises) with confidence.
On the one hand, the industry will view Google’s attempt to measure TV and online activity as yet another layer to add to the multiple and confounding data sets that already exist for internet delivery. On the other hand, many believe that more data is better and that Google will extend BARB’s remit to include all video content online such as YouTube clips and other UGC content, as well as all other online activity. From our point of view, we’re intrigued - and hopefully delighted - to see TV’s effect on search, email marketing and social media through a single survey.
One thing, though, is sure for the whole industry: measurement of our audiences and therefore understanding people is only going to become more complex, more expensive and more time consuming. But these are costs worth bearing.