How leveraging cross platform can help brands optimise TV media plan

In the Indian advertising industry worth hundreds of crores, TV advertising is still the most preferred medium for reaching the masses as it allows advertisers to reach out to people across different geographies, gender, languages and other target segments. While TV is still king, recent studies show that digital media is soon catching up, owing to its effective personalised engagement. Soon both mediums together are predicted to account for 60 per cent of a brand’s overall advertising spends. Yet, TV and Digital advertising platforms still continue to operate in silos, resulting in massive inefficiencies. 

Currently, TV and Digital planning and measurement are done independent of each other without any attempt to integrate the two plans or unify the outcomes. This leads to a two-fold negative impact on advertising outcomes. Firstly, siloed TV advertisers lose the opportunity to achieve similar results at a lower cost due to the distortion of ROI by channels with high cost per incremental reach (CPIR) in a TV plan. Secondly, siloed digital advertisers can deliver only ~10 per cent of planned objectives because they waste around 90 percent impressions on audience already optimally exposed via TV plan. Overall, advertisers do not achieve optimal outcomes with respect to their ad spends. 

The high value generated by TV advertising alone inevitably leads to higher costs and thus, advertisers devote significant effort in identifying the right mix of channels and ad spots for their brands. Despite significant resources being vested in making a TV plan, it is not the most efficient way of reaching out to the masses and it becomes necessary to optimise it further to remain ahead of the competition without burning a hole in your pocket. While TV and digital are highly impactful as independent mediums of advertising, their true collective potential is yet untapped. A typical TV plan can be further optimised by an integrated TV+Digital approach. 

Bringing TV and digital advertising closer will unlock immense value for advertisers, both in terms of cost savings and advertising outcomes. A cross-platform approach, that is, integrating TV and digital, enables advertisers to optimise impressions in two steps: 

• By identifying and replacing inefficient channels with high CPIR in a TV plan, brands can instead focus on audience unexposed and/or under-exposed on other TV channels.
• By deterministically targeting these identified audiences directly on their mobiles, any overlap between the two mediums can be avoided. Furthermore, any spillover of impressions can be eliminated by strategically targeting the audience relevant to a brand on the basis of demographics, consumer behaviour, NCCS category, etc.

This way, TV+Digital campaigns can achieve similar results in a more cost-efficient manner and ensures that there is no wasted impressions on the audience who are optimally exposed to the ad on TV and are not a part of the brand’s target group (TG). 

Cross-platform advertising > TV-only approach 

As to how much incremental value cross-platform advertising can generate as compared to siloed advertising, Zapr, a media-tech start-up funded by 21st Century Fox, Flipkart and Saavn, and backed by several iconic angel investors, conducted a detailed methodical analysis to evaluate the true benefits of cross-platform advertising. Zapr compared this to a TV-only approach to understand if it generated the same media objectives including reach and frequency. 

The analysis was done across seven different industries, including FMCG brands, OTT content providers, Indian insurance companies, etc. The results of the analysis proved that cross-platform advertising has the potential to cut down the campaign costs by 6-25 per cent, while delivering similar results for the same niche audience. In other words, re-engineered TV plan using cross-platform data saves an average of 15 per cent on overall ad spends while getting the same performance across a variety of industries.