Advertisers know linear TV spots drive store visits. Proving it is another story.
On Tuesday, Snap-owned location company Placed released a tool that attempts to tie the two together.
To power its offering, Placed is licensing viewership data from Inscape, the data division within smart-TV manufacturer Vizio, which has access to around 8 million opted-in households. It combines that data with TV creative monitoring through a partnership with Kantar.
Placed then connects that cocktail of data back to location data it collects from the roughly 300 million devices it sees on a monthly basis.
The purpose is as much to justify investment in television as it is to help brands figure out how to properly allocate their spend, said David Shim, CEO and founder of Placed.
“We’ve seen that 35% of campaigns result in incremental store visits thanks to TV ad exposure, which isn’t bad – but that also means that two-thirds of campaigns didn’t have that response,” Shim said. “People just aren’t optimizing to store visits or incremental store visits.”
Long-time Placed partner Taco Bell has been testing the TV attribution solution.
“We hadn’t seen a currency that worked across media channels using a single methodology,” said Lynn Hemans, Taco Bell’s senior director of business and social intelligence. “Historically, the fragmentation between channels was limiting the actionability of insights.”
Taco Bell started working with Placed in 2016 for location analytics and in-store attribution for its digital marketing efforts. A few months ago, Taco Bell commissioned the company to measure TV. It’s early, but “the results from this analysis are helping shape our strategy across media channels,” Hemans said. “The ability to quantify media offline has improved efficiency of media dollars spent to our core audience segments.”
Production company STX Entertainment is another customer. Movie studios face “data scarcity” issues similar to CPGs in that they typically don’t have ticket purchase data, said Amy Elkins, STX’s EVP of media and marketing innovation.
STX used to spend around 30% of its budget on digital and 60% on TV. More recently, it abandoned the traditional media mix in favor of an agnostic model in which the studio evaluates marketing needs on a case-by-case and a channel-by-channel basis.
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For the last three years, STX has been working with Horizon Media to build up its first-party data and run more addressable campaigns. It’s tricky without SKU-level data, said Erin Foxworthy, Horizon’s VP of innovation and partnerships.
“That is why foot traffic has become so important, especially with TV, which has been traditionally hard to measure,” Foxworthy said. “And we’re seeing the efficiencies, which is the huge surprise – that when TV and digital work together, there is efficiency in driving ticket sales.”
The plan is to keep pushing channel partners for better performance and better ROI. To do that, though, she needs the measurement to back her up, Foxworthy said.
In the addressable TV space, for example, the CPMs are high, but the cost of a movie ticket is low. She is trying to figure out how addressable TV is affecting ticket sales, how that compares with linear and how much reach is needed to drive people to the theater.
“These are still unanswered questions, and we’re continuing to test it,” Foxworthy said. “With our addressable partners, for example, the CPMs might not work for the movie category. In that case, we might have to think about renegotiation or reallocation into less expensive places, like digital.”
