The idea of advertising on TV seems foreign to digital marketers. Why “waste” budget on a medium that is untrackable?

Digital marketers have enjoyed the luxury of direct performance tracking. The ability to measure which source generated the most amount of users, directly attribute revenues from users to a source, while having the ability to do it all from the comfort of one’s laptop - anywhere.

TV advertising is “traditional”. It requires submitting tapes or high resolution video files. It requires localization and often, meeting local standards for messaging and legal language. Yet with all its overheads - TV Advertising ranks as one of the most efficient mediums for advertising.

TV Ads offer reach, prestige, and validating a product’s existence creating a spiral growth cycle (“as seen on TV”).

We wanted to bring this guide to help you learn how to measure the results from your TV advertising campaigns.

User Panels

A very old fashioned method to measure the effectiveness of TV advertising has been to hold up consumer panels. 

Product surveys in grocery stores, surveys in shopping malls (usually in return to some incentive to the consumer), or by providing a small percent of the population with a “clicker box”.

Brands have depended on panel companies to provide consumer data for more than a century. 

Some sectors of Advertisers, specifically: consumer goods, rely on this data as it does voice the average consumer and as some of those brands have no way to get direct 1st party data as they do not sell direct to consumers.

TV Blackout

Blackout is done by switching off Advertising for a period of time, reviewing sales lift, and switching TV advertising back on to monitor the delta.

Blackout is probably the most common method of TV advertising attribution - and for Advertisers who use TV exclusively - this is a very good way to run measurement.

For Advertisers who use multiple mediums and a media mix model - this method is not effective, and creates a potential opportunity cost that exceeds the gains.

Incrementality Testing

Incrementality testing provides operational insights for optimization, helping Advertisers unlock the full value of their budget.

This method can provide insights in granular levels over campaigns, demographics, vendors, geo location, contextual features. These insights can be used at an operational and tactical level.

By observing changes in sales and marketing cost data, incrementality platforms are able to create hyper parameters (a combination of parameters across a time series) that can show if a campaign is incremental or not.

Incrementality testing has been a holy grail in marketing , but only very few invested the resources required to evaluate it. 

With the current market conditions eliminating identifiable data companies are forced to make the effort of researching incrementality as the best alternative to measurement.

INCRMNTAL offers an incrementality measurement platform, allowing Advertisers to unlock the value of their marketing spend. Measuring the effectiveness of digital and “offline” activity, providing actionable insights for you to get the most out of your spend.

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!