Engaged Reach: The Turning Point for Media Buying?

We’ve previously reported that a digital media buying tipping point may be on the horizon as advertisers turn to an old friend: TV. Research firm Lumen found that only 35% of digital display ads receive views, and of those, only 9% of ads received more than a second’s worth of attention. This could mean that most digital ads, while resulting in great reach, are ineffective.

This doesn’t mean that digital media buys are dead, quite the contrary, as TV reinvents itself in the age of steaming. Per Ad Age, despite a decline in linear TV viewership (watching TV live, as it’s scheduled), TV is still by far the most popular leisure activity in the country. Along with the success of Netflix and Amazon Prime, broadcast TV networks have done a great job generating ad revenue with their on-demand platforms like Hulu, CBS All Access and Fox Now.

While the majority of Americans prefer to watch TV on their own time, they are watching more shows than ever before and engaging with these shows by sharing their experiences on social networks, turning “water cooler” conversations online. Furthermore, when viewers are watching live TV, it has turned into “event TV” like The Voice, DWTS, award shows and sporting events, where brands can engage with the show’s viewers with integrated campaigns that use their TV commercials as a launch pad to continue the conversation online via social platforms in real-time.

Shameless plug below for how we did this for Hoover Vacuums by pre-announcing on social networks the launch of their new TV spot on Monday Night Football and engaging with fans of the brand with a contest hashtag to encourage live interaction:

Ad Age and Brian Sheehan, a professor of advertising at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, define this new priority in media-planning as “engaged reach,” where broad-reach sites (TV and digital media such as Facebook, YouTube and major publisher/content sites) with the ability to gather a broad audience will become shorthand for engagement worth buying. Sheehan further argues that programs or websites with more narrow reach and high engagement will still be of value, but will carry a discounted CPM.

Not surprisingly, it’s two of the world’s largest and oldest advertisers who are backing broad reach, since they partly made TV the cornerstone of advertising media for decades. Ad Age reports that Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing Officer Marcos de Quinto defended TV as providing the biggest bang for Coca-Cola’s marketing buck. Coca-Cola’s data showed its TV investment “returning $2.13 for every dollar spent on TV, compared with $1.26 for digital.” Ad Age further reports that P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard will be increasing its spending “to benefit the biggest social-media platforms and ‘broadly-appealing’ TV shows,” and most importantly, noted: “On the TV side in particular, the move seems to reflect what some brand managers privately have said for years in the face of optimizer-driven buys that focus on thinly watched cable shows—that they saw better results from broader-reach primetime shows.”

Coca-Cola and P&G have proven over the years they’re in tune with their consumer’s wants and needs, so it’s again no surprise that they’re in tune with their consumer’s viewing habits. As more viewers choose which pay channels they want and don’t want, broad-reach sites win out as advertisers will make sure their dollars and viewing demands are going in the same direction.

While major advertisers are by no means de-emphasizing digital, or spending less, they are rethinking their approach to make sure it’s more efficient and less scattered across the internet and cable TV by relying on an old tried and true method: reach.