Peak time TV spots are the ‘Duracell Bunny’ of advertising. Their benefits keep going and going and going…
ITV has built, in conjunction with ViewersLogic, an industry first, multi-brand, cross market study that proves the value of peak airtime. Peak TV spots deliver direct responses in the short term, but their hidden value is in their longevity, generating responses long after other TV spot advertising has finished working.
The challenge:
Evaluating results from ‘brand’ airtime is difficult
Marketers are under pressure to prove the business outcomes from advertising, which can lead to a focus on short-term returns, where measurements are more certain.
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It’s much easier to measure web visitors arriving in the five minutes after a TV spot airs, than to count the extra visitors who arrive a week or even a month later.
It's believed peak airtime TV spots create more longer-term brand benefits.
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We often call peak time TV spots ‘brand’ spots
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And they carry a price premium to reflect their additional value
The research:
A 1:1 matched panel of TV spot views & web visits
Viewers Logic’s unique panel matches the TV spots that panel members have seen to their web browsing behaviour, making a 1:1 join between ad views and web visits.
ITV and Viewers Logic created an individual-level dataset that describes web visits in each week and attaches them to adverts viewed in different dayparts from the previous 7 days to the previous 3 months.
Logistic regressions measure the incremental change in web visits resulting from adverts in each daypart and across each time window.
The Hidden Value Of Peak is a study of 50 brands
ITV’s study, The Hidden Value of Peak measures responses to TV spot advertising for 50 large advertisers for up to 3 months after broadcast.
By using a unique dataset from Viewers Logic and by analysing 50 brands at once, The Hidden Value of Peak is able to measure effects that we cannot normally see using a model of a single advertiser.
The Result:
In the first 7 days, peak looks similar to daytime but peak spots have a longer lasting impact. When we total the full benefit over 3 months and apply cost and duration weighting to the uplifts, Peak spots generate 1.4x larger returns than daytime.
Focusing on the short term (5–10 minutes) inevitably leads to underestimating the cumulative response to advertising and this is true of daytime spots as well as peak. Though both are affected, it is clear that such models incorrectly favour daytime over peak as they cannot accurately demonstrate the latter’s longer-term value.
Even an advertiser that measures the uplift from a TV campaign over the recommended 7 day window still needs to remember that the full effect their daytime adverts are generating is over double what has been reported, while the real benefit of their peak time spots is over 3 times higher.
To find out more about the research, get in touch at mit-group@itv.com
