OTTAWA – The days of a siloed approach to advertising in the digital and linear TV environments are coming to an end, according comments at a session on the evolution of advertising at the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) annual Prime Time in Ottawa event.
Barb McKergow, head of marketing ventures at Shaw Media, noted that while the broadcasters and producers may have drawn a line in the sand on the TV and digital platforms front, viewers have a different viewpoint. She described the experience as “fluid” and that consumers don’t really see two screens. From an advertising agency standpoint, Dino Demopoulos, senior VP and head of strategy at DDB Toronto, acknowledged that the firm has largely abandoned the idea of talking about two different sets of advertising.
For Jake Norman, head of agency development at Facebook and Instagram Canada, the mobile platform has been the biggest disruptive force in advertising because 56% of consumers’ time spent on digital platforms is now on mobile. That brings in a number of challenges for advertisers such as ensuring that audience expectations of immediacy have to be addressed, but most importantly, this is no longer a binary conversation with digital on one side and linear TV on the other, it’s about understanding how they work together in a sort of ecosystem.
He highlighted an example of how using an ad in digital can enhance the message on TV. “If you take a TV commercial with the first exposure within a Facebook feed environment and the second is on TV, that TV exposure actually becomes more powerful,” said Norman.
The session started off with moderator Brent Bernie, president of comScore Canada, citing some statistics on the growth of digital advertising and the digital platform. There was approximately $3.5 billion spent on digital advertising in 2014, $100 million more than on TV. About six times more hours are being spent on mobile apps in a month than are being consumed by a browser and 2.2 million people access the web exclusively through a mobile device.
Mark Finney, VP of strategic sales at Bell Media, countered that those figures are a little misleading. Despite the rise in digital advertising, TV adverting revenue has increased. This means, he added, that the advertising pie is expanding. TV is still a good platform on which to advertise because 50 billion hours of TV content is consumed in Canada and 25% of Canadians’ waking lives are spent in front of a TV.
“If we can marry the power of TV and the intelligence of data, then TV is very relevant and has a really dominant play in the media mix.” – Barb McKergow, Shaw Media
All of the panelists acknowledged that more effective measurement for the TV platform is critical. (This was explored during the media leaders session earlier on Thursday.) As an industry, broadcasters need to figure out how to get more granular data from their set top boxes, too. “Getting better insight into those audiences and having the ability to be a bit more targeted would be extremely valuable for us as an industry. If we can marry the power of TV and the intelligence of data, then TV is very relevant and has a really dominant play in the media mix,” said McKergow.
Added Norman: “I think what we need is to take all of the various pieces of data that exist about different things and look at them all through the same view.”
Linking audience measurement in digital and TV would be a boon for not advertisers but also broadcasters and digital media producers.
If the different platforms can be linked together, be used for their respective strengths to tell advertiser stories to reach consumers at the right time on the right device it could be very powerful for advertisers, noted Finney. There is room for improvement but getting this integrated approach to measurement under the right ethical and legal frameworks would be a significant step forward, he added.
