When your Ad is on the line: Predicting TV performance while your campaign is still in-flight

TV has endured for decades without anything close to a scalable, real-time ad measurement solution. Historically, marketers have had to wait until TV campaigns were off the air before they could even assess whether the ads worked—or their money was wasted. This is a foreign concept to any brand investing smartly in digital.

It’s time for more TV advertisers to adapt.

Such limitations cannot survive the financial scrutiny of today’s C-suite. With the threat of a recession looming, brand advertisers must create impact with their audiences. But it’s no longer sufficient to simply report how many people in which demographic groups are watching weeks and months later. The TV measurement world struggles to keep up with technological and behavioral changes brought on by the convergent TV landscape—or even keep up with what digital competitors offer in performance metrics.

But a transformation is happening. Today’s savvy TV advertisers can optimize campaigns in in-flight—just as they do digital ads—based on online signals. Many brands are tapping into companies, like EDO, that leverage search, that thing we all do when we want to know more about something. EDO matches TV ads to branded “search spikes” as a reliable predictor of consumer intent and a proven, leading indicator of a brand’s future market share.

Since 2015, EDO has worked with advertising—including top spending brands in entertainment, auto, CPG and more—to revolutionize TV ad measurement by using cutting-edge data science to predict performance outcomes from their media investments, connecting TV engagement to purchase. EDO’s SaaS tool and service have been used by Hollywood movie studios to improve crucial first-weekend audiences for new films, by auto brands to boost showroom traffic during the critical President’s Day weekend, and by finance and insurance brands to optimize wear-in and wear-out across a plethora of ad creatives. The TV advertising world is more complicated than it was 70 years ago. EDO’s predictive outcomes data cuts through the noise to find what works.

“Not all signals are created equal. Optimizing business outcomes on television can be complicated,” said Brian Lin, senior VP of product management and advanced advertising sales at Univision. "However, through EDO’s behavioral response data, we’re able to confidently understand as well as predict real-world consumer engagement with the TV ads that run on our networks.” 

A conversion rate for convergent TV ads

Starting with a census-like record of every TV ad run since 2015, EDO connects this occurrence data to actual in-market search activity generated by each and every TV spot with a sophisticated regression analysis. With more than 9 billion Google searches conducted each day, digital search is the most robust, real-time barometer of human interests in existence.

EDO is able to detect every brands' ad occurrence—across both linear and streaming—and connect it to engagement and performance through a regression analysis of metrics. That includes search engagement rate (SER), an indexed composite value of the incremental lift in search observed in the minutes following an airing.

SER shows the proportion of people watching a given ad that engages by searching for the advertised brand or product. Many TV advertisers consider this a “conversion rate for television ads." When combined with detailed data about each spot—the creative variant as well as the network, program and pod position—this analysis enables marketers to change their media plans in near real time and adjust content to get more engagement.

For a year-end sales event, luxury automaker Lincoln created four TV spots and used EDO data to identify the best performer (dubbed “Snow Globe”), which drove 16.8% more consumer search engagement than the lowest performer (“Goat Yoga”). But the problem for Lincoln was “Snow Globe” had the lowest airing allocation planned (17%), while “Goat Yoga” had the highest (40%). 

Automaker Lincoln used EDO predictive performance data to allocate more media to this previously under-invested, over-performing ad, "Goat Yoga," gaining$354,000 in additional media value.

By optimizing the ad rotations based on EDO’s data, Lincoln generated 5.9% more total engagement for the remainder of the campaign than if it had not altered its rotation. These changes allowed Lincoln to gain additional consumer engagement equal to 59 ad airings, or $354,000 in media value, with no extra media spend.

Putting ideas into action—before and after the big game

So, what does all of this mean for marketers right now? For one thing, brands can continuously improve the performance and impact of TV ads in the days and weeks leading up to live TV events—like the Super Bowl, or broader sports investments—moving the needle on their big business bets.

Tentpole events should not be the end point, but rather the beginning of a dynamic and optimizable ad campaign where marketers improve results by tweaking creatives and placements to optimize the media performance, ultimately boosting the company's market share. With real-time ad performance metrics, marketers can know what works to drive business results.

Automaker Kia continues to do just that. A long-time investor in live sports, including the NFL and the Super Bowl—Kia is the official auto manufacturer of the NBA. But in a fast-changing auto market — with the rise of EVs, supply-chain, and gas-costs impacting demand daily — auto brands have to make sure their advertising is breaking through and driving results, now more than ever.

Kia dedicated 13% of their national TV buy to the NBA. The latest NBA Season includes two hair-raising spots: “Stunt Wars" and "Flat Spin." While both ads performed well, “Flat Spin,” which features the Kia F5 taking a spinning leap, showed off-the-charts engagement. Armed with this timely data, the brand increased the spot's rotation in their NBA ad mix, ultimately increasing the ad's business impact.

Armed with EDO predictive engagement data, automaker Kia increased their business results by increasing rotation of the top-performing ad "Flat Spin."

"The idea is simple," according to Russell Wager, Kia's VP of marketing. "Marketing pros have always been listening to what their viewers have to say, but that analysis came after the fact. In a world of streaming and on-demand viewing, expectations for TV have evolved. Now advertisers can, too."