Once the domain of behemoth brands, Over The Top advertising has seen creeping democratisation and increased accessibility for smaller companies seeking to reach wider audiences and affirm their presence as brands.
Online natives, already digitally mature, have embraced the inherent requisite to establish their brands as well rounded, meaningful entities, and have embedded OTT ads into their strategy.
Meanwhile, traditional brands, fluent and focused on the OTT space, monitor and admire dynamic online natives for their digital prowess and seek to learn from them – whilst competing with their overspill into OTT spaces.
Among the most customer resonant strategies, TV programme sponsorship and influencer endorsements have advanced digital natives’ initial paid and earned media investment and given them valuable airtime.
Love Island, the most commercialised show on British TV, has drawn sponsorship from JustEat, Tinder and numerous online-only fashion brands, and spawned influencer partnerships aplenty every season. Those brands know people are invested in the lives of the people on screen, and getting people when they’re already emotionally invested is brand gold.
Challenger brands and online natives who have taken this leap have succeeded in taking market share and airtime from beloved household name brands.
More scalable opportunities for smaller brands
TV advertising today is a more dynamic offering. With the advent of Smart TV, ads are trackable, deeply data informed and more cost effective than ever before.
Relative spend and impact metrics are sector dependent. Nevertheless, exploring relevant data, getting familiar with econometrics, and knowing spend as it pertains to each individual business and sector, will identify scalable opportunities for many brands who previously thought advertising on TV was a ‘one day’ dream - a nice to have, but not on their immediate radar because it is perceived to be unaffordable. Which is a misconception when some TV spend, especially more targeted campaigns, have spending parity with digital, but with a longer lasting impact.
It makes sense that many brands focus on attribution and programmatic solutions because of their immediate correlation with ROI. Purists know the value of beauty, laughter or shock factor. The emotive powers of great creative, their impact and our ability to recall them, will never be lost to data.
Data-driven TV advertising becoming more sophisticated and accessible
The trend for TV advertising to become data rich, nuanced and personalised is happening already and will only become more sophisticated, enabling easier and more equitable access for those who thought TV might be out of reach.
There are ads we have all looked at and said - “that’s genius”. Ads that made us laugh out loud, ads where you’ve repeated the catchphrase or sung the jingle. It's worth taking a moment to reflect on your personal favourites (or watch a countdown documentary on the best) and reflect on why the creative is so powerful.
TV is proven to support organic search (albeit with some seekers clicking through sponsored content on search platforms). For those brands whose paid and organic content outputs have peaked and plateaued, TV offers a fresh frontier and a growth milestone. For brands with a compelling story who live their values championed by creative and backed by data, the potential ROI from TV becomes highly appealing.
Using data to unleash the power of creative
In 2022, the personalisation and customisation options open to marketeers will graduate from their infancy and people will be more connected to brands than ever before.
Data allows us to build on these relationships at a granular level. Using data to unleash the power of creative makes for a harmonic blend of art and science. Strong creative, clear values and purpose not only complement digital activation strategies, they are also inherent to their success. This will continue to be important throughout next year and beyond.
The agency world is still siloed into different areas of expertise, often in competition with each other and vying for the same pot of client budget to do impressive work. There is a school of thought that the golden ratio for investment in brand/activation should sit around 60/40, but siloed marketing activity is affecting real world implementation of this advice.
While one person’s silo is another’s specialism, clients who have multiple agencies handling different areas of their business; advertising, PR, digital, creative et al, producing fully integrated campaigns with perfectly synergistic activations is an ongoing struggle and an area of waste which restricts full brand activation.
This needs to be addressed; how it’s done depends on each agency environment and set up, since not all agencies can provide full service. However, clients have to be facilitators in inter-agency collaborations on strategic implementation. With measures of marketing effectiveness becoming more honed, the best campaigns of the future are those which are well timed, fully explored data driven creative, implemented across all physical and virtual brand touchpoints - that means integrating teams and agencies into strategy like never before.
Tech-tainment is the future
Instant, measurable and trusted, TV has a bright future and the medium itself is still emerging. The UK, though home to a huge media and tech industry, is still years behind nations such as Japan and South Korea when it comes to widespread adoption of the crossroads between technology, entertainment and ourselves. Embedding the Metaverse into their strategies is a thing of now, not the future.
For example, in South Korea, which has one of the most sophisticated home-shopping markets in the world, the infomercial format of the west is dropped in favour of entertainment style formats with popular hosts. These same channels have already developed sophisticated AR and VR technology to allow them to be selling merchandise in the Metaverse.
Smart TVs, connected devices and gaming consoles all capture data and therein can show an audience brand content they will be interested in, then evaluate the success of those campaigns, adjust, and retarget accordingly.
Direct Response TV does exactly what it says on the tin - produces an immediate action which offers people the opportunity to buy products and services, utilising similar rules to digital and social campaigns, such as a prominent call to action.
TV needs to be on the radar of brands who haven’t considered it before because a level of sophistication is emerging that brands can’t afford to miss and like everything else will be part of the Metaverse experience.
Those embracing this technology in 2022 will not have first mover advantage, but they will set a robust course for growth and find their niche – provided of course they can integrate and streamline their brand and activation strategies and budget in harmony with each other.
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