Project Lantern: TV ads and the outcomes business

Driven by wider industry demand to bring digital and TV campaigns closer together, broadcasters and video publishers are looking to use online search behaviour to enable advertisers to better target connected TV (CTV) ads.

Insights from searches on advertiser websites can provide a window into consumer attitudes, interests and intent to buy something. Search also provides marketers with real-time data that is unprompted, granular and comprehensive, making it very useful for targeting ads.

“The world is shifting from buying eyeballs to buying outcomes,” says Kate Waters, Director of Client Strategy and Commercial Marketing at ITV. “Those outcomes can be digital intermediate behaviours like search queries, web traffic and putting items in your basket on a website or you can get into hardcore business outcomes which would be sales, profits and impact of advertising on price elasticity.”

“TV advertising is a fantastic ad product and for a long, long time we’ve never really needed to work very hard to sell it” Kate Waters, ITV

Advertisers can already buy such information from Meta or Google. As well as information about campaign reach, they can get data that informs them how to generate web traffic, increase interactions and maximise conversions.

Data from agency Group M suggests that 80% of ad spend goes to outcome-based performance channels across all channels, including search.

UK commercial broadcaster ITV’s own estimate is that more than 50% of video ad spend in the UK is now spent on such outcome denominated products (on Facebook and Insta videos for example).

“The reason why TV needs to get into the outcome business is because increasingly that’s where the money’s going and if we can’t persuade people that we can generate those outcomes then we’re just going to get less and less cash,” Waters said last December.

“We need to give TV the measurement it deserves,” she tells IBC365. “TV advertising is a fantastic ad product and for a long, long time we’ve never really needed to work very hard to sell it. But in a world where we are increasingly competing for ad dollars with the platforms, we’ve got to get much smarter at selling the whole value that TV advertising creates.”

The power of search and CTV combined

TV is synonymous with a full spectrum of genres and emotions, whether someone is watching midday dramas or high-octane live sports. When people search on a website search bar, they type in what they want or need and, often, what they’re willing to pay for.

By connecting those behavioural search insights to CTV inventory, advertisers can serve their ads to the audiences searching for specific brands, products, competitors, or related terms at the most opportune times. Behavioural search insights can also be utilised in post-campaign to see if and how search behaviour has changed.

Sky’s advertising sales arm Sky Media has been doing this for two years using a tech it developed called Search Behaviour in conjunction with third-party search data from Captify.

Search data such as the number of times an internet user has searched for something and their intent to buy is then matched with first-party Sky audience data to boost targeting capability on its AdSmart platform.

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Captify is also partnered with US online ad tech firm Magnite which sells inventory on CTV on behalf of clients.

As Magnite explains, e-commerce sites offer users search bars for researching products and identifying their next purchase. Content publishers provide search bars so users can quickly search through articles and videos to learn about specific news or topics they are most interested in. People search for things to watch, things to buy, things to learn, and much more. The data and insights from those onsite searches provide a window into consumer attitudes, interests, and intent.

From search to screen

Captify is able to ingest all those search terms made on millions of publisher websites, analyse and categorise them into profiles, interests, and moments, and convert them into audiences for activation on CTV inventory and, according to Magnite, that’s revolutionary for TV.

For example, a consumer searches for ‘best honeymoon destinations’ on cosmopolitan.com, ‘iPhone vs. Galaxy Camera’ on techradar.com, and then ‘NYC to Maldives’ on booking.com. Captify collects that entire string of searches, analyses the searches, looks at relationships between those searches and searches made by other consumers, and then categorises it all into audiences.

In this specific example, the consumer would be put into audience segments that may be called: ‘Engagement’, ‘Techie,’ and ‘Travel.’ Media buyers can then target these audiences across CTV inventory with relevant ads.

Sky search behaviour categories include Home & Garden, Travel, Games, Pets, Home Improvement, Real Estate and Fantasy Sport. These habits can be combined with any of the other existing 1,000-plus AdSmart attributes (ranging from postcodes to ‘life stage’ or an advertiser’s own first-party data) to refine campaigns.

As an example, a custom campaign could see a holiday or insurance company target those who are actively searching for holidays or flights. This could be further refined or creatively adapted to those looking at beach, sightseeing or ski holidays in a specific area of the country.

“Captify is able to determine who is truly interested and ultimately has the intent to purchase a product. By pairing that with premium CTV inventory through Magnite, we can focus on the interests and behaviours of the households we are trying to reach,” said Britt Augenfeld, VP of Video and Advanced TV at Captify.

Measuring outcomes

ITV has gone in a slightly different direction. It is putting the focus of outcomes on measuring the impact of a TV spot on downstream web activity.

With ad-tech measurement companies Adalyser and Innovid, ITV Adlabs created a way to isolate the effect of a direct-to-consumer brand’s advertising with ITV in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Addressable Lift works by bringing together data on the viewing of TV adverts by individual households, with data on those same individual households’ web visits. These two datasets are joined using IP addresses to create a 1:1 link between linear TV and BVOD advert views and visits to an advertiser’s website, measuring any response that happens online, including sign-ups and sales before tying these back to the TV spots that caused them.

Ben Farren of menswear label Spoke, who took part in the pilot, said he was sceptical whether VOD could deliver sufficient incremental impact over linear to make the investment worthwhile.

“However, the results which showed the behavioural impact of our campaign, not just the impressions delivered, has given me the confidence to keep investing in the addressable targeting opportunities ITVX enables,” he says.

“You’re getting into the world of being able to say [to an advertiser] ‘if you tell us what your profit margin is we can tell you how much profit you’re going to generate off the back of this campaign.”

Project Lantern

“Over time we will be able to build a really good panel to measure the vast majority of campaigns that run on television” Kate Waters, ITV

Recently ITV announced the development of a project to build a multi-outcome TV measurement initiative. Project Lantern is being developed with Sky and Channel 4 as a system that will offer advertisers and buying agencies a way to measure the impact of their TV advertising activity on a host of online outcomes – a large but historically unquantified aspect of TV’s value.

The PoC will crunch together TV impression data provided from the four million home Sky panel, and around two million YouView homes, together with outcome data polled by Measure Protocol. Participants will be quizzed on questions such as which websites they visit (post viewing of an ad), how often they visit those sites, what product or service they put in their basket, and so on.

The first results will be made public in the new year. “It will only do linear to begin with but in future hopefully it will add in video-on-demand,” says Waters. “The ambition is that over time we will be able to build a really good panel to measure the vast majority of campaigns that run on television. And at some point in the future, we would love to invite the likes of Netflix to the party.

“The ambition would be to scale so in the future an advertiser could log into a portal and it will basically say this is what your campaigns have been delivered to you in the last month in terms of web traffic, queries and purchase. If we can get the panellists to collect the data - and obviously give us the permissions to use it - then there’s no end of the outcomes that we can measure.”

Rhys McLachlan, director of Advanced Advertising at ITV calls Lantern one of the most significant things the broadcast industry has done. “What we’re collaborating on is how we can more effectively use search data and online purchase data to establish the true contribution of television to the business outcomes that matter most to advertising customers.”

Advertisers aren’t as interested in the individual TV sales performance of ITV over Channel 4 as they are in the total TV performance. TV is bought and planned as a single channel, with the same ad unit (e.g. 30 second spots).

“If TV companies were to develop their own individual systems there would be a large amount of duplication and potentially different forms of measurement, making it difficult for advertisers to assess the impact of their advertising across TV as a whole,” argues commercial TV lobby group Thinkbox.

When combined with CTV, viewing of TV overall is increasing but the onus is on TV sales houses to demonstrate the value of that line on the media plan.

Waters urges: “Let’s just stop worrying so much about measuring reach and let’s worry about measuring the stuff that for advertisers that really makes the difference, which is the impact of their campaigns. What is it actually doing for your business? Is it actually converting into value? That’s where we’re focusing our efforts.”

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