Busting Silos in TV Measurement to Drive Cross-Media Ad Effectiveness

In a siloed media landscape, how do “TV” ads contribute to your media mix? 

Television commands a significant share of advertising budgets thanks to its ability to engage mass, diverse audiences with impactful brand messages. However, viewership habits have evolved from linear… to increasingly digital consumption across multiple devices and platforms. Through these changes, “TV,” in all its forms, has remained one of the most trusted mediums for growing brands. 

TV advertising will see more change and innovation in 2024. Amazon Prime’s ad-supported tier is already amplifying the competition for advertisers’ dollars, and new ad-supported streaming TV apps are on the way. As publishers and their advertisers lean into CTV, it’s imperative that they keep the viewers’ brand experience front and center. Download our Ad-Supported Streaming TV report to learn about consumers’ experience expectations in this dynamic medium.  

And, there’s other work to do too. Campaign measurement strategies must evolve right along with the new channels and ad formats ushered in by CTV. Campaigns rarely run on TV alone. We live in a cross-media world, where campaigns appear on digital platforms, social media, and legacy mediums too. How can you understand how your TV ads contribute to campaign effectiveness overall when all of these channels are measured in silos? 

Let’s explore the innovations in ad measurement that have made more holistic campaign measurement possible.

Why TV measurement has remained siloed to-date

TV’s long history as a commercial medium means that traditional measurement approaches are deeply ingrained, making it harder to embrace new strategies. Inertia is a real force, even in Adland. Here are a few reasons why TV ad effectiveness measurement has stagnated.

• Legacy metrics: TV measurement has long been anchored in legacy metrics such as Gross Rating Points (GRPs) and audience reach. These metrics emerged when TV was the primary entertainment medium, and they served as a benchmark for evaluating campaign success simply based on eyeballs reached. Truthfully, ratings were always a better metric for use as a trading currency versus understanding campaign effectiveness. The quality of engagement with your advertising and the impact on consumers’ perceptions and behaviors must also be considered.
• Overfocus on brand metrics: TV advertisers have traditionally relied on brand lift studies to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, but now... that is not enough. With CTV, “television” now has the same powers fueling the phenomenal growth of digital advertising over the past many years. Now, there are pathways to action prompts, like QR codes or live links. And let’s not forget that many people multi-task with their phones or tablets while watching TV. Today’s premium video (TV) advertisers need to measure outcomes too. Brand impacts are extremely important and because of its nature TV will continue to hold immense power for brand building. But looking only at brand KPIs provides only partial visibility into campaign performance.
• Attribution challenges: Unlike digital advertising, TV has lacked the granularity needed to attribute specific actions directly to TV ad exposure, or to understand how TV ad exposure synergized with other campaign exposures in channels like digital, social, audio, or out-of-home. Many advertisers have often relied on unreliable proxy metrics and attribution models that may not accurately capture the true impact of TV advertising.

DISQO’s cross-platform measurement offers a sustainable path forward

Advertisers need more from their measurement partners. Justifying investments in linear and streaming TV – along with social and digital – is fundamental to budget decisions and defending the return on ad spend. DISQO’s Ad Measurement busts through the many silos created by media fragmentation to demonstrate how our clients’ ads drive brand growth and bottom-of-the-funnel outcomes like search, site visits and shopping that lie closer to sales.

How? Let’s dig into the details of our Brand Lift and Outcomes Lift products that deliver the cross-media insights advertisers truly need.

• Single-source, cross-media insights: For too long, advertisers have had to stitch together different sets of campaign effectiveness data from their various TV, publishing, and social media partners. DISQO solves this with one platform and one objective methodology across omnichannel campaigns. Our ability to measure attitudes and online behaviors allows us to demonstrate exactly how TV placements impact campaign effectiveness, and the same for digital and social. These insights allow advertisers to allocate budget to the most impactful channels in their media mix and optimize campaigns ongoing. 
• Full-funnel, granular metrics: DISQO goes beyond traditional attitudinal metrics like awareness, consideration, and intent to unveil the concrete actions resulting from campaign exposure, like digital search, site visits, and shopping behaviors. This allows us to exceed the limited brand-focused KPIs most commonly used to measure TV campaign effectiveness.  
• Consented, first-party data at-scale: Our consumer relationships are 100% direct. There are no intermediaries. We simply and transparently ask people if they would like to share about their brand experiences and many of them say yes! With our proprietary mobile and desktop metering application (not reliant on cookies), DISQO is able to help clients confidently identify ad-exposed consumers and then measure lifts in perceptions and behaviors relative to consumers who were not exposed to the campaign. Because of the rich identity-based profile information our audience members share, we’re able to offer clients the deepest insights available in the market. 

Measure TV alongside digital and social media!

We know how important it is for you to understand how your cross-media campaigns are working holistically. You need to know how your TV ads – linear and CTV/OTT – are working, alongside your other big investments in digital and social media. How do you measure the relative contribution of every channel and understand how well they work together? 

DISQO’s clients know the answer. Neala Brown of Teads said about working with us:

Our inventory has expanded out of just Display and Mobile and into CTV. On the publisher side, omnichannel measurement is critical to us as we try to understand how it is that different channels deliver for our clients. We have to speak to the outcomes that our advertisers are looking to create, wherever their ads may appear.

Neala Brown
SVP, Strategy & Insights

Download our TV Measurement product card to catch up with Neala and the hundreds of other brands, agencies, and publishers who have chosen DISQO as their trusted ad measurement partner.