New, more accurate TV ad effectiveness measurement

by Nigel Hollis

Question: what happens when you cross Samba TV’s data from Smart TVs in 13.5 million U.S. households with Kantar Millward Brown’s 8 million Ignite Network® desktop panelists and 3 million mobile panelists? Answer: the opportunity to precisely measure the brand impact of TV advertising on the same basis as digital.

If you are not familiar with Samba TV here is what you need to know. Through an integration with 10 leading Smart TV manufacturers, Samba is integrated into the chipsets of Smart TVs across 13.5MM households in the U.S. Samba TV’s 1st party, owned and controlled audience data is 100 percent privacy compliant and FTC-approved with a 2-step opt-in process and easily accessible opt-out functionality.

This means that Samba TV’s Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology instantly recognizes any content playing on a Samba enabled TV, regardless of how that TV inventory was purchased (e.g. linear, addressable, OTT).  Video fingerprinting matches TV ads in real-time to a database of 40,000 executions. This means passive ad exposure data is now available from SmartTVs, connected and mobile devices and set-top-boxes.

When a Brand Lift Insights study is conducted the exposure data is passed back to Kantar Millward Brown and exposed and control respondents are surveyed on brand and attitudinal measures to identify the lift in brand metrics between the two groups. This is essentially the same methodology that has become the industry standard for measuring the impact of online and mobile advertising but now applied to TV.

So what do we see in terms of results? Our initial Brand Lift for TV norms demonstrate that:

1.     TV advertising is salient, even among the younger audiences who we tend to associate with mobile. On average exposure to TV advertising led to an 8.6 percent increase in TV ad awareness for 18-24 year olds, similar to other age groups.
2.     Brand Lift for TV norms also quantitatively demonstrate that TV advertising builds predisposition with all age groups having significant increases in purchase intent. Biggest increases are among the 18-24 year old audience.

There will no doubt be a lot more learning about what works and what does not but no longer do advertisers have to infer whether their TV advertising helped build brand equity. Brand Lift Insights for TV helps identify the overall impact of the campaign and benchmark it against the industry. The findings can also demonstrate which elements of a campaign are working most effectively and how changes can be made to improve campaign effectiveness.