The Convergence of Digital and Linear Advertising for TV

Television has evolved into a multi-platform market consisting of linear and digital streaming and on-demand offerings across a fragmented media ecosystem. Consumers are now watching TV across more devices, apps, and publishers than ever before. As the way audiences consume TV content has changed dramatically, advertisers have shifted media spend to follow. By 2025, the combined U.S. ad spending on linear and connected TV (CTV) platforms will exceed $93b, from just under $80b this year—all of that growth will come from CTV.1 As the lines between linear TV, OTT/CTV, and digital video blur, advertisers and agencies have begun combining media budgets. 

The coupling of linear and digital is shaping the future of advertising. A true convergent TV—linear plus connected TV and over-the-top services—ad strategy requires dynamic planning and activation across media channels, with the goal of becoming proficient and fluid across all screens—driving more tailored and efficient campaigns while empowering advertisers to strategically reach and resonate with valuable audiences.

The Best of Both Worlds

Cord-cutting is less of a phenomenon than it had been originally anticipated. Consumers are still happy to pay for traditional TV and are more likely to stack their streaming subscriptions on top of their cable or satellite service. In fact, 63% of Americans subscribe to both a streaming video platform and cable TV.

From an advertising standpoint, linear and digital media each have unique advantages. TV has incomparable reach and has typically been used for branding and awareness; while digital—which offers incredible targeting capabilities—has been used to drive more specific performance outcomes. A common misconception is that advertisers and agencies should be moving ALL of their media budgets to streaming. Linear TV is not disappearing and remains vital to any media plan. For some advertisers, it could be more efficient to reach younger viewers on CTV as opposed to linear, but the approach doesn’t have to be exclusive to either platform. Diversifying your media investment—coupled with the right campaign measurement and reporting—can produce very powerful results. As television continues along the digital path, the goal of advertising on TV screens is evolving accordingly.

Maximizing Your Impact

An IAB study found that linear and CTV had different strengths and weaknesses, reinforcing the point that using the two in tandem is a good best practice for TV advertisers. The research found that U.S. marketing professionals considered CTV more effective than linear TV at driving advertising ROI and managing frequency.2 However, respondents rated the two mediums roughly equally when it came to driving reach—still one of the fortes of linear TV with its massive scale.

The convergent TV landscape offers new opportunities for advertisers to connect with the right consumers, and deliver more successful campaigns that are beneficial to both advertisers and viewers. Convergent TV offers large, captivated audiences, high-quality content, an abundance of inventory and digital-like targeting, with precise measurement and attribution. Convergent TV is sure to spark innovation, fuel new levels of customization, and potentially bring about new business models. Here are some best practices to take advantage of all that a convergent TV approach has to offer:

• Automate buying across screens to drive more uniform, efficient ad buying
• Leverage a balanced targeting strategy by determining the right balance of audience data and contextual signals to drive relevance and boost campaign impact
• Unify campaign management of all TV campaigns to unlock strategic applications, such as negative targeting and frequency capping
• Measure and optimize in real time to unlock opportunities across platforms

How Digital Remedy Can Help

Backed by over 20 years of experience in the ad space, Digital Remedy is a leading media partner for advertisers looking to maximize their advertising efforts. We provide unique targeting tactics to extend reach beyond linear, connecting with the right audience, in the right mindset, as well as granular attribution and reporting to understand the true impact of every variable within your campaign.

Advanced Targeting Capabilities

Through our strategic partnership with Samsung Ads and LG Ads, Digital Remedy provides Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) targeting, which leverages real-time smart TV data and comprehensive audience segments to reach new, diverse audiences across exclusive inventory. Advertisers can:

• Leverage precise targeting and powerful insights data to reach new segments at scale 
• Pinpoint viewers engaged with specific linear content verticals, including entertainment, movies, sports, news, music, game shows, talk shows, variety shows, children’s/family content, and more
• Reach the audiences who saw (or missed) their TV spots and reconnect with them 1:1 via mobile, tablet, desktop, or OTT
• Activate against target TV audiences based on keyword, network, movie genre, program, or cast
• Conquest competitors by targeting consumers who’ve seen competitor linear advertisements 
• Optimize reach and frequency across unduplicated audiences and understand the true impact of their TV advertising

Full-Funnel Attribution

TV has always been considered as purely an upper-funnel, branding play for advertisers—but we, at Digital Remedy, suspected TV advertising had a much larger impact on the bottom line. While innovations in attribution have brought the focus away from video completion rate (VCR) and toward return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per action (CPA) metrics, those goals are merely scratching the surface of CTV measurement. While CTV/OTT ad revenue continues to rise, ad executives are worried about key metrics, with 60% believing that when they buy CTV impressions, they’re losing sight of the reach, frequency, and effectiveness of their campaign 3—that’s not the case with Flip, our performance CTV platform.

With Flip, we’re able to match ad exposure data to online and offline activity, including site visits, online purchases, app downloads, and foot traffic. Having this level of data enables granular measurement and full-funnel attribution that not only proves impact and effectiveness but also informs future activations and uncovers audience insights not previously possible in a traditional linear universe.

With precise targeting capabilities and in-depth attribution and reporting, Digital Remedy provides the ability to generate incremental reach when running CTV in combination with linear campaigns and ensure you are reaching your target audience, on whatever device they are consuming TV content. 

Speak with a member of our team today to learn more!

Sources:

1. eMarketer, TV Ad Measurement 2021 Report
2. IAB, May 2021,  Connected TV is the Driving Force in 2020 Digital Video Advertising Spend
3. Marketing Div, 1/19/22, TV tops in video for reaching advertisers’ goals, survey finds