Big brands capture reactions to ads with new video technology
The question of adoption was answered early this year, when the company announced that both Unilever and Coca Cola would use the technology to measure all of their marketing efforts this year. In the consumer products wars, perhaps tweaking your video assets to get an extra smile or “wow moment” will give Coke what it needs to pick up market share from Pepsi. Even if that is not the case, the measurement will give their agency creative a very real—and real-time—indication of how impactful their content is.
I think this is a great sign.
The relentless automation of digital media seems to have taken a lot of emphasis off the creative. Now that digital marketers can buy audiences so precisely, delivering the right message doesn’t seem to matter as much. For agency people like R/GA’s Michael Lowenstern, who recently spoke at Digiday Agency Summit on this topic, the right equation is right message plus right creative equals more performance and lower costs. His recent Verizon campaign used hundreds of individual banner creatives, matched to audiences, and raised sales of FiOS 187%. That’s sales increase—not an increase in campaign performance.
Creative matters
When talking about higher funnel branding activities using rich media and video, creative matters even more. Building brands takes means connecting emotionally with consumers, so it would seem like technologies like Affectiva’s, which utilise “big data” approaches to drive branding, all the more relevant for this day and age. Research presented by The Intelligence Group’s Allison Arling-Giorgi at the recent 4As conference showed that Generation Y consumers find humor the most effective form of advertising, so Unilever leveraging technology to squeeze one more smile out of a 30-second spot starts to make a lot of sense.
In the case of Intel, adding a “webcam” to a set top box sounds really scary from a privacy perspective, but starts to make a lot of sense when you think about the migration of television ad dollars to display.
Theoretically, the shifting dollars reflect a desire on the advertisers’ part to achieve more granular targeting, and put the right ads in front of the right people at scale. The digital display channel offers lots of targeting, but the low-quality inventory, commoditized and bland creative units, and tremendous amount of fraud have kept a lot of TV money on the sidelines.
In 2009, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker estimated the gap between where people spend their time (increasingly online) and where advertisers spend their money (TV) represented a $50 billion global opportunity. While that has shrunk considerably, the gap is still measured in the tens of billions, despite the enormity of Google, and the embrace of ubiquitous social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Connected set top boxes may be biggest online advertising disruptor
Despite being a mass reach vehicle today, plans like Intel’s threaten to disrupt online advertising in a far more fundamental way than digital has been impacting traditional ads. Connected set top boxes are connected to households—the composition of which are easy to access, both from a demographic and financial perspective. They also tend to deliver a much more engaging video experience for the brand advertiser than ignored “pre-roll” inside a tiny 300×250 pixel video player.
Now, add the element of being able to actually see who is on the couch watching—and tailor ad messaging to those viewers, based on their age, and contextual relevance of the content they are consuming. That’s powerful in a way that digital cannot ever become, despite the rise of “social TV” watchers who tweet during “appointment viewing” shows like The Walking Dead.
Delivering ads to TVs, depending on who is watching them? That’s something to really watch out for.
