Published in Digital Marketing Magazine
Television continues to be the UK's favourite leisure pursuit. With people spending an average of nearly four hours a day watching TV, the medium is in rude health. However, beneath the surface, things are changing rapidly.
While place and time-shifted viewing behaviours continue to evolve, TV and web are intersecting, challenging advertisers to think beyond the traditional mass broadcast model. And it's against this backdrop that personalised TV advertising has blossomed, piggybacking on a wider market demand for meaningful "personalisation at scale".
In a nutshell, personalised TV enables brands to distribute tailored messages to audience segments, based on prior knowledge of household location, composition, and other lifestyle and life-stage attributes, with the added effect of being able to overlay your own brand customer data on top.
Sky AdSmart is leading the charge with a proposition across TV, VOD desktop and mobile, reaching more than 7 million homes, and with more than 700 advertisers and 4,000 campaigns signed up to date. Examples of this new-found TV muscle include online retailers targeting distinct gift buyer segments, upmarket estate agents reaching only high income households and dating sites helping single occupancy households find that special someone.
However, this level of detail may not appeal to all advertisers, particularly those big brands comforting themselves with Byron Sharp's mantra of the simple need for efficient, mass awareness in order to reach that long tail of light buyers, and non-buyers, with the purchase headroom to drive future sales growth.
But that is to slightly miss both the point and the opportunity. TV has always been flexible – as legions of regional and response based advertisers would testify. Yes, generally speaking, the more niche (or smaller) the brand, the greater the opportunity on offer. But personalised TV fuelled by customer data offers so much more. Delivering a relevant brand experience that responds to an important customer need, at the right moment, is actually a function of loyalty.
The opportunity for tailored TV strategies to identify and respond to everyday "moments of truth" along uniquely defined customer journeys, should be recognised as invaluable to big brands too. For example: a car brand engaging a warm "brochure request" segment to help nudge conversion to test drive; FMCGs offering information to first-time mums entering the baby category; or for retailers, complementing existing linear "big brand" TV with a creatively sequenced, locally relevant store message or promotion - delivered either at home or on the go, triggered by geo-location and served on a mobile device close to the point of purchase.
This brings us neatly to the concept that we live life locally. The meshing and stacking of TV with other layers of hyper-local, addressable digital media such as search and online display, as well as traditional analogue local media, becomes hugely exciting. Johnston Press and Sky's ad sales partnership shows that video hasn't killed the analogue star just yet. From car dealerships, to regional rail operators and local government authorities – case studies reveal a fascinating portrait of this new-found regional flexibility.
A possible downside to this new golden goose? A drop in creative quality that could pollute the medium - the perennial struggle of regional media. And US local cable networks remind us how bad it could get.
Overall, however, the future is bright. Forward-thinking TV advertisers have the opportunity to reach discrete, high-value audiences, while simultaneously creating a complementary microcosm to linear TV, a feedback loop to experiment with messaging, frequency, regionality and more.
TV planners are free to be proactive, reactive or adaptive. Fluctuating regional variations in distribution, weather, health, culture or events can all be addressed, and increasingly in real time via programmatic integration with other addressable channels.
Personalised TV marries the emotive art of branding with the science of content delivery. Connecting viewing behaviour directly with sales impact at household level fundamentally changes what the medium is: a merged broadcast and CRM channel offering the most powerful creative canvas an advertiser can choose.
The other good news is that it's measurable too. Dunnhumby has partnered with Sky using a representative measurement panel of 500,000 UK homes, to evaluate the FMCG sales impact of both linear and personalised TV campaigns at a household level.
Through the solution we are able to connect the shape, weight and frequency of TV campaigns with viewing patterns to quantify audience value and resulting behaviour change both in store and at home, helping advertisers and agencies plan for future campaigns.
While personalised TV advertising is still very much in its infancy and has its fair set of challenges, the genie is quite clearly out of the bottle. Combining the best of broadcast, direct and online: let the future begin.