Yes, TV is your friend

By Kim Portrate, ThinkTV
Published Mumbrella

Kim Portrate, CEO of ThinkTV Australia, argues television can work in tandem with online-only channels to deliver the best results for marketers.

About a million years ago, while proudly wearing the blue and white check uniform of my primary school, I learned some big life lessons.

The first was that checks are definitely not my best fashion choice. The second, more important lesson was that when somebody asks if they can be your friend, the answer should always be “yes” – because nothing truly important is achieved without others. It’s not just that they need your support, you need theirs to get a job done well.

And today, as a CMO-turned-CEO with a host of media channels to befriend, the lessons ring truer and louder than ever because the job at hand is to help businesses and their brands grow. In 2018, marketers must be discerning and optimise their media mix according to the task in front of them.

We know media selection isn’t a simple, binary choice. We know it takes a cocktail of media channels to move consumers through the path-to-purchase to grow brands and businesses. ThinkTV exists to provide advertisers and their agencies with facts and data about the effectiveness of video advertising to ensure they have what they need to make good decisions about their media mix.

Along the way we have unearthed evidence about TV’s ability to effectively drive business outcomes. We believe the relative effectiveness of every media platform is central to the choices marketers make about their media mix. TV is a very powerful advertising platform for marketers, and a multitude of studies show TV has a multiplier effect when deployed with other media. But don’t take my word for it – look to the independent experts who have been at this a lot longer than ThinkTV.

Les Binet, one of the planet’s most revered marketing minds, spoke at the Agency Leader’s Symposium in the Hunter Valley in September about how media works better when it works together. As Binet’s awesome chart below shows, brands that use of a combination of video platforms generate the most growth.

Binet and his fellow “Godfather of Ad Effectiveness”, Peter Field, found brands that use TV only get more than double the average market share gains (per annum) of those that use only online video.

They also identified the magic “friendship” multiplier, where adding online video to the mix makes TV work almost 20 per cent harder.

It’s no news that the real work of advertisers and their media agencies is to determine the optimal split of media channels in order to deliver to a specific objective. Advertisers have a multitude of considerations when determining that mix. How quickly do you need to see a sales impact? Is the brand in a brand-safe environment? Is the ad visible? Is the ad viewable to completion? Do you need the sound on? Do you need the media effect to work long after the ad has aired?

Professor Karen-Nelson Field’s work on The Benchmark Series shows TV stacks up very well against all these variables. That’s not to say TV is the only media channel required, but rather to provide insights into the strengths of a channel that has been a great mate to marketers for more than 60 years.

So, if you want to know if TV is your friend, we think it’s a pretty definitive “yes”. You’ve got a friend in TV.