TV advertising has “never been stronger”, according to Jon Hewson, Managing Director at programmatic media specialist Audience Store.
However, the shift in the way that consumers watch content – “we can watch it in real-time, we can record it, or we can pause it, we can stream” – is “becoming an issue” for traditional linear TV advertisers. “Traditional linear TV is still a wonderful medium … but it has changed,” said Hewson. The question for TV advertisers has become: “How do we find people viewing in all the ways we know they’re viewing?”
This was the challenge faced by Furniture Village: an experienced linear TV advertiser who wanted to reach new TV audiences and get more from their advertising budget in the run-up to Black Friday last year.
Hewson explained how the retailer took the decision to expand into CTV to find new audiences, what the results were, and why the best approach for advertisers is to “keep it simple” with connected TV advertising.
“TV advertising has been a key part of how [Furniture Village] has got to the heights that they’ve got to,” said Hewson. “They love TV – it works for them, it moves the needle … [but they] can’t quite get the same efficiency they used to be able to get.”
For Furniture Village’s first foray into CTV, “what we wanted to do was make it easy for them to understand and easy for them to measure – and easy to do it as an overall TV buy,” said Hewson. “So, it was important we could talk to them in TV language.
“… we did a deep dive into where we thought there was an opportunity to generate incremental reach and to improve the efficiency of their traditional linear TV advertising activity.”
Reach and frequency are the key metrics for gauging the success of any TV campaign. Hewson noted that a viewer needs to encounter a message some three or four times before it sinks in, but beyond that, the ad can start to see diminishing returns.
By redirecting some of the spend that would have gone into more ad repetitions and investing it in CTV, Audience Store realised that they could enable Furniture Village to reach new audiences with the same budget. “Rather than hitting the same people more times, if you can reach more people … the more chance you have of people coming in and buying furniture,” Hewson explained.
“[Instead of] a competitive offering, it was more of a complementary offering. … The main KPI for the campaign was to reach and engage with incremental customers above and beyond who they could reach through [linear] TV.”
As Black Friday is one of Furniture Village’s biggest trading periods, it made sense to test the new approach at a peak time and hopefully maximise the results. “We’re pleased to be able to report than we delivered more than what we expected,” Hewson said.
Two thirds (66%) of the impressions from the CTV advertising successfully reached people who hadn’t been exposed to Furniture Village’s linear TV ad – in other words, new audiences. At the same time, Furniture Village found that they had reached a slightly younger demographic of viewers under 40 – and “quite often those are homemakers” – who weren’t aware of the brand.
The connected TV ads were also able to reach viewers at new times of day, when they might not have been consuming linear TV, but were watching CTV instead; there were also geographic regions where CTV could move the needle more than linear TV. Ultimately, “a mosaic of different factors” played into the success of the campaign, Hewson concluded.
He added that although Audience Store consider TV advertising to be “first and foremost, a brand engagement mechanism – it’s all about engaging with consumers with the highest propensity to be interested, rather than necessarily a direct response medium”, Furniture Village were also able to track and attribute “significant” direct response from viewers who had been served the TV ad.
This included some visits to brick and mortar stores, which is a valuable metric for an omnichannel retailer to see uplift in.
Other than adapting its brand creative slightly, Hewson said, Furniture Village didn’t need to alter much to make the switch from linear TV to CTV advertising. “We see ‘TV’ as a channel … Streaming is becoming a shared experience now. … Two or three years ago, it was probably more of a one-to-one [format], but it’s becoming a proper TV experience now. That’s important – it is a mass reach medium now in the same way linear would be.
“We like to keep it simple – connected TV is TV. Whether it’s linear, whether it’s connected, whether it’s VOD, whether it’s catchup – it’s all TV.”
Hewson also believes that advertisers should be less wedded to a particular broadcaster or streaming provider on which to serve their ads, and should instead “look across all of them” – provided that the environment is brand safe and high-quality.
“Quite rightly, advertisers want to be associated with premium brands – like Channel 4, like ITV, like Sky, like Netflix, like Disney+ – but … if we can find a potential customer for Furniture Village who is interested in their product, doesn’t know about them, as long as we’re serving an ad to them in a premium environment … it’s about finding the right eyeballs with an audience-first approach.
“That’s a challenge that the industry has got to really try and educate advertisers to get away from. There’s so many [providers] now. We don’t believe you necessarily need to be wedded to a particular [broadcast] channel.”
Thanks to the success of Black Friday 2023, CTV has proven itself as part of Furniture Village’s media mix, and Hewson says the brand is now “putting their foot on the gas”. “It’s working well, and it’s becoming an integral part of their media plan.
“They’re using it tactically and also strategically – they’re building it in across the year as complementary activity to what they’ve always done with TV; and then tactically, for specific events – like Christmas, like Black Friday, the various things that they do across the year.”
Furniture Village are also beginning to explore some of CTV’s unique attributes, such as adaptive, personalised creative. “I think we all know – if the advert is relevant and personalised, it’s going to get your attention more, and you’re more likely to engage with it.”
Hewson highlighted that CTV and digital delivery enable “a whole new opportunity with metrics, and with targeting” that you “simply can’t get” through linear TV and Barb, the industry standard measurement solution for linear TV viewership – “because Barb is probabilistic data. [It’s] very robust … but it isn’t based on real-time, deterministic impressions served.”
With that said, Hewson also cautions against over-embracing the digital capabilities of CTV to the point of departing from what makes a good, solid TV ad. “You’ve got to be careful, because TV advertising in particular is an art, not just a science. People want to see beautiful, entertaining, engaging, attention-grabbing TV ads.
“You don’t want to make them like annoying online banners – if you do that, it just becomes counter-productive. … There are all sorts of things you can do – but are they the right thing to do?
“You watch TV to watch great content – and the ads should be the same.”