It’s not often that someone in media moves from Sales to
Research but Nora Shimmel, who began her career as a sales assistant in
broadcast spot sales, is one of those rare talents.Currently working as the Senior Research Manager at Comcast Spotlight, Shimmel has found that adding set top box data to her arsenal of research systems has greatly heightened her ability to parse the tuning habits of television viewers and, “utilize data to drive successful campaigns for our clients in ways that are feasible and that our sales team can execute.” Comcast is especially rich in data and boasts a new platform which, she noted, “gives us a lot of levers that we can pull to execute a linear TV buy in several ways for our clients depending on their goals.”
She has just completed a seminal study on the four Best Practices
for driving tune in and building loyal viewers in a time of almost limitless
entertainment choices. This data-centric study enables Comcast Spotlight’s
Media and Entertainment clients from both movies and television to better target
the right viewers at the right time on the right platform.
The Basis of Best Practices
Shimmel
explained the process of forming these best practices through research analyses
and data mining. “The best practices came about as a result of the expansion of
our conversion studies. We joined our ad exposure data with our viewership data
in a privacy compliant way,” she explained, in order to, “move the needle to
drive show viewership for our clients for all aspects of television whether
live or in a catch-up strategy.”
Using
Comcast’s own viewership data to do that, at first manually, required several
groups within the company to coordinate their efforts. Soon the process was standardized and they
could see, “what trends there, what methodology was most consistent, what works
and doesn’t work.” Shimmel’s group analyzed and tested 36 campaigns across all
genres and networks, checked for synergies and conflicts between programming
types and networks, monitored the trends and outcomes and identified four general
truisms that most drove results to benefit clients.
Shimmel
explained that within Comcast, they can access viewership data from 70 million
homes, resulting in ample data from which to draw conclusions. “We don’t have
to model anything. We have true viewing data at our fingertips.” It took about
a year of hard work to analyze the results and formulate conclusions.
The Four Best Practices
According to Shimmel, best practices are the recommended ways
in which media and entertainment clients should think about investing in TV.
The research behind these best practices have proven to drive tune in and
overall viewership of all content.
The four key best practices crafted by Comcast Spotlight to insure
a successful advertising campaign are:
Take a Sustaining
Media Approach. According to Shimmel this is specifically for episodic
programming, different for a movie on demand. “For episodic programming we
recommend five to seven weeks of sustaining media, promoting multiple episodes
as well as live and time shifted viewing,” she stated. Viewing is fragmented
and getting more so. “People are watching in so many different ways, the idea
is to give them an opportunity to catch up to find out what your show is
about.” She also added that live viewing is important but there is also value
in time-shifted viewing in the plus three window and even further out for
viewers to catch up. Having a sustained media campaign allows for the content
to reach more people and results in a better lift in ad conversion.
Multi-Platform Touch
Drives Superior Tune-In. Once a multiple week media approach is applied,
the next question is where the campaign should run. “Twenty five of the 36
campaigns were running on both linear and VOD. We bucketed the exposed
households into linear-only, VOD-only or exposed to both,” she continued, “and
frequently we saw that the exposed-both had the greatest conversion rate.” She
attributed this to two things – increased frequency exposure and the
differences in mindset when watching on one platform versus another. The study
continued with campaigns that ran on one-to-two platforms compared to those
that ran on 3+. “The exposed lift compared to the unexposed was nearly double
for 3+ campaigns,” she concluded. “You need multi-platform to grow your reach
and to find people in the right moment to take action.”
Invest in Platforms
Strategically. Now that it is proven that a campaign needs to run on
multiple platforms, which platforms are most impactful, how should they be
layered and how this can best fit into the budget? “We looked at how the
different platforms work, the difference between an average reach versus an
average lift. For a local campaign the conversion rate may be a little lower
overall but the lift may be very high. You need to have the broad coverage but
also hammer home with a niche strategy,” she advised.
Build Target Audience
Segments Wisely. “Knowing that we are recommending niche on top of broad,
we were starting to see a lot of ‘don’ts.’ What targets are we seeing that are
doing the best? Who might be your target that you have not previously
considered?” She added, “We started seeing targets that were not doing well
such as those who were only targeting their previous season’s viewers who are
already very invested in the show.” Clients must expand their range and not
just target previous franchise viewers of a show. “Find conquesting viewers to
grow your incremental households,” she advised, “And using data is the best way
to do that.”
Having these best practices provides a good roadmap for both
media companies and advertisers in this ever fragmenting and increasingly
complex media world to improve overall performance. “We want to continue our
efforts, monitoring trends and get even deeper data to look at time of year,
for example, as well as additional analyses to inform catch up strategies and
binging and other ways to get consumption,” she concluded.
This article first appeared in MediaVillage.com
No comments:
Post a Comment