• We’ve been talking for awhile about how digital and TV advertising are converging, but what does that mean in practice? At RampUp on the Road Dallas, we sat down with Jamie Power, COO of one2one Media, to understand why the convergence of is happening now and which companies are doing it well.

    RampUp: Jamie, thank you so much for joining us.

    Jamie: Thanks for having me.

    RampUp: So you just wrapped up our RampUp on the Road in Dallas session with a talk about the convergence of digital and TV advertising.  From your perspective, what does that mean?

    Jamie: I think that we’re at an inflection point in the television marketplace and we’re able to use data differently. Technology and data have changed the television marketplace forever, and I think clients are getting more in touch with their data. They’re storing their data. They want to activate it.  

    Clients have been activating on digital for years, and now we’re able to start doing that in television. I think what’s going to accelerate growth is being able to action on uniform audience segments across multiple screens and then tie it all together with attribution.  

    RampUp: So what would you say is the main difference that you see between when the first addressable TV ad was placed maybe eight/nine years ago and today? Is it really that data piece?

    Jamie: I think it’s the data piece. I think in the beginning, the metrics we were looking at in addressable were different. One of the first metrics in addressable was tune away, and it was literally ‘how long would somebody watch a commercial before they turned to a different channel?,’ which is interesting, but it’s not the same as how we’re measuring digital campaigns today.  

    So I think that we’re finally starting to do things the same way. That’s the convergence that makes sense in the heads of marketers, because we can’t measure one media channel one way and another media channel a different way and still be able to optimize our budgets and understand the effectiveness of the different channels.

    RampUp: So, similar to what you were asked on stage, who do you think is doing really well in terms of standardizing their measurement and using data across channels and across screens?

    Jamie: I would say, auto advertisers, because they’ve been in from the very beginning. They are using their historical data, they have benchmarks, and they know what works and what doesn’t. I mean, they have it down to a science.  

    Generally, any auto advertiser who has enough frequency is looking at a 4-to-1 return on ad spend on an incremental basis. That’s pretty high. CPG is doing well, but CPG is doing it for specific use cases, so it’s not for broad-based targets. But if you’re doing it to steal share from a competitive set, that really works well.  

    Some giant retail clients are using all of their first-party data because they want to understand the responsiveness of their entire consumer file regardless of channel. Before the campaign, these advertisers may have hypothesized that they wouldn’t need to send messages to the “uber users,” because they already frequently shop at that specific store. But they saw from this campaign that if they advertise to known, valued customers, then their cart size went up by 25%. So that’s an insight that we never would have gotten before if they weren’t savvy about their data and standardizing its use across channels.  

    I think any advertiser who is willing to bring their data to the table and be transparent about what they want to learn is doing it right. I think that any advertiser who is waiting for it to be perfect is doing it wrong.

    RampUp: From a skillset and staffing personnel perspective, what are the auto companies, CPGs, and the other companies you mentioned who are pretty savvy with addressable and other data-driven TV advertising doing right in terms of the people they have?

    Jamie: They’re bringing marketing and analytics together. With some of the financial companies that we work with, there’s two different sets of KPIs.  Marketing wants to look at one thing and the analytics team wants to look at another.

    The analytics team would set certain KPIs, but it wasn’t the data that the marketing team needed.  The companies that are starting to bring marketing and analytics together and measure things the same way are doing it the best.

    RampUp: That was something interesting you said about the people who succeed the most in addressable, or when they’re in the test-and-learn phase, are the ones who delineate their campaign goals well. Can you give us an example of one that appeals to marketers and analytics across digital and TV?

    Jamie: Yes. We just did a campaign with an online retailer who had never done television before. They have brick-and-mortar and we wanted to see if television as a channel worked. We did three different targets: their existing customers, lapsed customers, and competitive prospects sourced from third-party credit card data. We created an equal distribution across all of those audiences.

    So the client was happy they were able to use the same targeting they used digitally, but then on the back-end of the campaign we were able to tell them, if you had allocated against these audiences a little bit differently, the return on ad spend would have increased by 57%.   

    With addressable everyone gets kind of hung up in the beginning asking, ‘is it going to work?’  But I honestly think that’s the wrong question to ask. We’ve never had transparency in television, so if it doesn’t work, that data is still valuable because you’re able to go in and optimize future addressable campaigns, and more importantly, fix what’s broken in your linear campaign.  

    RampUp: On stage you mentioned that television’s going to change more in the next two years than in the last fifty. What changes are you most excited about?

    Jamie: I don’t know how it’s going to change, but just having a seat at the table and working in television right now I think is the most exciting job that anybody could have.  

    RampUp: Thank you so much for your time, Jamie.  

    Jamie: Thank you.

    Subscribe to RampUp