Over the next several months, TV marketers will commit around 75% of their national TV budgets during the pivotal Upfront season, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $43 billion in annual national TV spend.
Unfortunately, most of them will make these expenditures with no way of knowing whether viewers ever had a chance to see their ads. After all, many of the ads that are purchased during the Upfront will air in empty rooms, after viewers have left to get a snack, make a phone call, or go to the store. In fact, recent research from IPG Media Lab, using TVision data, finally quantified this for the market - an estimated 29% of TV ads go unseen.
Needless to say, non-viewable ads don’t make an impression on the viewer, and they certainly don’t persuade anyone to make a purchase. That amounts to approximately $12.5 billion dollars worth of national ads playing in an empty room. If marketers want to better allocate their spend in the Upfront season, they’ll need to use attention data to shift their spending toward ad placements that are most likely to air while viewers are in the room.
Indeed, the billions marketers are allocating right now is a lot of money. Marketers can’t afford to spend it in a way that does not actually reach their viewers.
How attention data analysis leads to stronger results.
Just as there’s a risk in buying low-attention inventory, TV marketers can benefit greatly from focusing their spend on high-attention campaigns.
Over the past few years, TVision has used its proprietary computer vision technology to better understand how people really watch TV. Our solution tells us whether our opt-in panelists are sitting on the couch or somewhere else outside the room, on a second-by-second basis, for every ad and program that runs on TV.
What we’ve learned is that there is significant variance in ad attention, based on TV network, time of day, audience demographics, ad placement, content type, pod position and a host of other factors. By isolating and analyzing these variables, marketers are able to predict which dayparts, networks, programs and other ad opportunities are most likely to lead to their ads being seen.
Even better? TV advertisers can take this information to the next level by using the TVision platform to build a media plan that maximizes attention by segmenting high and low-attention placements by audience type. The result is a TV ad strategy that delivers significantly higher performance. For the average national advertiser, making even a few points of improvement can put millions of their ad dollars to work.
It’s time for marketers to step into the light.
We finally have the ability to close the long-standing blindspot of TV Attention. Advertisers can now actually target the best available inventory and execute campaigns that deliver real, measurable business results.
This Upfront season, the choice is simple: continue spending money in the dark OR use newly available TV attention data to illuminate the path towards more strategic, effective media planning.
With so much at stake, can your brand afford to stay in the dark?