TV media is not yet dead! Programmatic technology enables advertisers to refine the placement of advertisements in near real-time. Thus facilitating the optimization of advertisement investments. How can these innovative tools be used?
Guillaume Hervet is an associate professor in the marketing department at GEM. As an expert of digital marketing and advertising strategies, he is the co-author of a new research publication on the topic of programmatic advertising. The findings of this study will enable TV advertisers to improve the efficiency of their advertising schedules according to their competitor's advertisements.
"Programmatic advertising is an automated purchase mode for advertising that builds on criteria such as audience, price and performance. This technology comes from the world of online advertising, which combines with tracking technology to enable the analysis of website visitors. Programmatic technology has now been adapted for TV in France via the platform adkymia.com,
Increasing the efficiency of ad campaigns
"Before the existence of this technology, it was almost impossible to account for a competitor's advertisements when establishing a strategy. Today, these techniques help improve ad efficiency by analysing the number of visits to a website, the number of leads, and the number of conversions," says Guillaume.
The goal of this study was therefore to determine if a brand can improve the efficiency of its TV ads by taking into account its competitors advertising strategy. In other words, the study helps us understand how a brand can use TV ads to increase the number of visits, leads and conversions with the same budget simply by broadcasting an ad at the right moment.
Thanks to an analysis of 43,000 ads by a partner brand and 49,000 ads by the partner's primary TV ad competitor, the study highlights four strategies for programmatic advertising.
Four situations and recommendations
1) The brand broadcasts an ad when the competitor is not broadcasting its ads.
The optimal strategy is to broadcast ads when competitors are not advertising. This "total avoidance" strategy creates the best results with a 59% increase of web traffic due to TV ads in comparison with the competitor's strategy.
2) The brand broadcasts ads on specific channels on which the competitor is not broadcasting.
This "partial avoidance" strategy also enables an increase in traffic (+55%) in comparison with the competitor's strategy.
3) The brand broadcasts ads on the same channel and time slot as the competitor but broadcasts many more ads than the competitor.
In this case, the brand suffers an important decrease in traffic (-70%) as compared to the current strategy.
4) The brand broadcasts ads on the same channel and time slot as the competitor, who is broadcasting as many or more ads.
In this case, a substitution effect happens in favor of the competitor and the efficiency of TV ads for the brand is near 0. This is the worst scenario that must be avoided at all costs.
In conclusion, Guillaume underlines: "Today, we can quite accurately predict the time slots and channels in which a competitor will broadcast TV ads. As a result, an advertiser can noticeably improve its strategy by anticipating a competitor's ad programming and this, without increasing its advertisement budget. This technology will also play an important role in increasing the reliability of these predictions."
