Planning
Big Boys, Channel 4
Video planning
Rob Beckett's Smart TV, Sky
Just as video viewing appears to have entered a period of stability and relative predictability, so too has video advertising. With such choice and complexity available to advertisers, making sense of the video advertising opportunity and the trends within it has never been more important.
Video advertising time has stabilised
Broadcaster TV remains the bulk of video advertising
Looking at 2023 in more detail across both Individuals and 16-34s, broadcaster TV continues to account for the majority of AV advertising time, with YouTube the next biggest player.
Broadcaster TV continues to account for the majority of AV advertising time
With the SVOD ad tiers coming into full force in 2024, the recent trend of decline in video advertising time within high-quality content is likely to reverse.
This prediction is based on modelling that 90% of Amazon subscriptions, 10% of Netflix subscriptions, and 5% of Disney+ subscriptions will be on their ad tiers – meaning an extra 20 billion 30-second ad views in professionally produced content in 2024.
With this increased opportunity to reach audiences in the high-quality environment of TV, budgets should follow.
Reach planning
Weight of viewing is critical analysis for reach planning
Although averages are useful starting points, for reach planning we need to understand the nuance of how viewing varies across the population.
All platforms obey Pareto’s law to varying degrees
This chart shows the breakdown of all viewing to all types of video on all devices and splits the population into tenths based on their weight of video viewing. What’s clear is that some people watch a LOT of video, some don’t watch much at all.
What matters is the reach opportunity in ad-supported content
This pattern is not unique to one video platform (or any media); it’s a fundamental pattern of media consumption and all types of video see the same picture emerge to varying degrees.
From a campaign planning view, we can limit our focus to just ad-supported channels – so commercial TV and SVOD ad tiers (modelled on the same ad tier subscription assumptions above) – plus YouTube. We should also zero in on the TV set, as we know this creates the optimal environment for advertising and so should be the primary choice for building reach.
To achieve this, we split it out into % of viewing by each decile with the total time spent viewing across the top (see chart).
We can see that linear TV easily gets an advertiser to 50% of the viewers, hence why it’s so critical on the plan. We can also see how important video on demand is for the lighter half of viewers – both broadcaster VOD and SVOD ad tiers are complementary to linear TV and should be used to help maximise reach. YouTube on the TV set also plays an important role in reaching those lighter viewers.
Linear TV easily gets an advertiser to 50% of the viewers
More than reach: mapping media on quality
Celebrity Big Brother, ITV1
Although reach is rightly a primary focus for media planning, planning against reach alone can lead to ineffective campaigns as it ignores the critical qualitative factors of the advertising environment. But there are novel new ways we can map media to bring out their powerful, sometimes overlooked, qualities.
Mapping media performance
This chart, by Richard Kirk from EssenceMedia.com, shows how, in order to plan effectively, we need to map media on more than just MRC-level reach potential. Richard has updated Thinkbox’s previous ‘Signalling Success’ study to expand the number of media channels and provide a post-Covid view of signalling power. It shows Linear TV, BVOD and Cinema all sitting in the top right quadrant in terms of quality as scored in terms of signal strength and attention. Inspired by the idea of mapping media performance, we’ve explored how else we could plot the relative performance of media across the key measures for some common marketing objectives…
Influence
Let’s start with the power to influence – the role media and advertising can play in influencing somebody’s perception of a brand.
To do this we need the following data:
- Weekly reach – we don’t want to only influence a small section of the population, we want to influence all potential buyers
- Trust – our message will have limited impact if it’s not trusted by our audience and they don’t implicitly or explicitly believe what we’re saying
- Media multiplier – we’ll want to employ the channels that are best at driving a media multiplier to amplify our ability to influence perception across all channels.
Map these across the media where each measure is available from a common source and you get this charge.
TV sits in the top-right corner – it’s the most trusted channel, it delivers very high reach and has the strongest media-multiplier effects. Radio and print also perform well.
Memorability
Next, let’s look at Memorability. Obviously you want all your advertising to go into the long-term memory, but it’s particularly essential for brand effects, and businesses with long purchase cycles live or die by their ability to deliver advertising that lives long in the memory.
To do this we need the following data:
- Average ad view time (seconds) – in order to drive memorability you require a bit of time because we’re much more likely to remember stories that unfold rather than facts. Data on duration of visual attention for ads across different channels reveals which media offer us the most time to tell our story.
- Emotion – it’s proven that emotion and memory are highly linked. The more emotion we can evoke in our advertising, the more likely we are to be remembered.
- Long-term multiplier – we want media that are proven to deliver longer-term effects. If an ad is still causing an effect 3-6 months after the campaign has finished, it must have gone into our long-term memories.
TV again stands out from the crowd on these measures. Memorability is one of TV’s superpowers. Ask someone in the street to name the ad they currently like the most, rarely will they mention anything other than a TV ad.
Sales power
Finally, we’ve looked at pure sales power, mapping media on their relative ability to deliver an incremental uplift in short-term sales.
For this we used:
- Low cost per second of attention – this is a great measure for comparing channels in terms of relative cost-effectiveness for the attention we get.
- Weekly reach – again we want to speak to all potential customers, not just a subset – this ensures scale of sales vs. efficient but low volume sales.
- Return on investment – we’ll want to use channels that are proven to deliver a return on investment.
Again TV outperforms other media.
As this is a Thinkbox analysis, you could fairly accuse us of cherry-picking areas to analyse where TV is strongest. You’d be right – although I don’t think many people would argue that influence, memorability and sales power aren’t vital qualities in advertising, so worth examining if possible.
Mapping media in this qualitative way is a useful exercise for any given objective and we’d encourage you to do the same with your own data – the simple exercise of mapping media on more than just reach delivery is more critical now than ever before given the fragmented market we now live in.
