Marketers need to accept that digital video advertising, for all the benefits, positives and data-filled beauty, is not the same thing as advertising on TV. Despite what publishers might have us believe.
It’s been the flavour of the decade for digital video ad platforms, like YouTube, to take aim at the big spends of advertisers on TV. One of their favourite tactics is to position themselves as “bigger than TV for X audience”, suggesting that the only benefit to advertising on TV is the ability to reach a large audience, in an effort to elevate their position in the media pecking order. YouTube even went as far as launching a product called “Google Preferred” which they consider a direct replacement for reach on TV. For a moment, let’s ignore the debate around the validity of the reach claim. There has been much debate about when a view is not a view from people much more qualified than me (like Professor Mark Ritson who famously referred to it as a “tsunami of horse shit”).
The key, lies in understanding it’s impact on the overall communications system and applying a lens to measure efficiency (e.g. reach) AND effectiveness (e.g. attention and engagement).
TV and digital video are simply NOT the same in terms of the audience experience. I don’t, for one second, argue that digital video advertising doesn’t have a place in today’s ecosystem of content consumption. I believe it occupies a very important position. I’m a big fan of a robust mix of channels to communicate a message, and with the drift of audiences to online video, it’s an absolute must to be in these environments.
The experience of watching a video on my 5-inch mobile screen is NOT the same as watching the latest series or show on a 50-inch 4K LED TV. TV has a significant advantage over digital video when it comes to trust.
This trust could easily be attributed to the maturity of the channel. We’re comfortable with TV. We’ve all grown up with it. But it’s more likely that the perception of TV as a medium, in that the capital cost of entry is typically quite high, means that we immediately see the brands advertising as big. And big means trustworthy. There’s inherent value for brands in just being present on TV that you don’t get through digital video.
But what about engagement? Surely online video viewers are more engaged, and therefore, more likely to be receptive to ads? I mean, they choose to watch the content they’re watching. Right?
Content engagement does NOT equate to advertising message reception.
“TV engagement is mainly of the subconscious kind and it is effective at building strong brands, due to the low attention to TV ads, the emotional stimuli are more effective because the viewer does not notice and therefore counter-argues against them” - Heath, R (2009) “Emotional engagement: how TV builds brands at low attention” Admap, July/August 2009, Issue 507, pp. 29-31.
All those presentations where digital video ad publishers have spruiked the value of the “lean in” experience seem, after all, to be wrong. Because the audience are more engaged in the experience of watching video on a device or desktop, most likely wearing headphones, they’re actually more likely to reject a brand’s ads.
There is a growing sense amongst progressive marketers that in order to achieve the optimum mix between TV and digital video, one must seek to assess the opportunity on an “apples for apples” comparison. Whether it’s 15, 30 or 60 second TV ads or three second, sound off environments, new attention analytics capability (such as viewability) are telling an important story that marketers must heed. Ad reception has an inverse relationship to engagement.
The holy grail is to find true de-duplicated reach across platforms. And with the rise and rise of programmatic for broadcast television, this will become a reality in 2017. Once marketers have all the data at their fingertips, we’ll be able to build strategy that is creating a true communication system.
Marketers need to ask more questions about the true value of each of these new platforms. Consider how they’re experienced in the real world. How they’re experienced and consumed by real world audiences.
By MediaCom content and connections planning director, Beau Curtis