The Highest Reaching Campaigns All Have Similar Attributes: Revealing Findings from Effectv’s TV Viewership Report

The report notes that successful video ad campaigns, those that provide the greatest reach, share similar attributes and media mixes. “Brands that optimize reach and results are deploying a common approach, with traditional TV as the foundation and streaming as a supplement, to reach those hard-to-reach viewers,” the report states. The importance of traditional TV as a pivotal element for a successful campaign is a fairly stunning revelation and demonstrates the importance of linear TV in a campaign strategy.

The study also reveals that high-reach campaigns have a combination of consistent advertising over a broad range of dayparts, endpoints, networks, FAST, VOD, and live programming from news and sports. The identification of these elements provides a roadmap for advertisers to maximize their reach across platforms.

The report analyzed 40,000 multiscreen campaigns. “There are qualifications required for campaigns to be included in a TV Viewership Report analysis,” noted Annie Hagerty, Research and Insights Manager. “We have minimum investment and impression delivery requirements, and focus on local advertising campaigns that include both traditional TV and streaming.”

While there are many new ways for consumers to access content and many more varieties of content available, traditional TV leads all other forms in driving reach in a multiscreen advertising campaign (77%). Streaming and free ad-supported streaming TV play important roles in attracting reach to light and no-TV viewing households, so a careful combination of all viewing forms is vital to reaching as many viewers as possible.

Interestingly, while optimizations can vary by ad category, audience, and geography, the essential foundations of a multiscreen campaign remain true across these different factors. “Regardless of ad category, audience, or region, we see that traditional TV provides a scale of reach that advertisers should maximize, while streaming provides incremental reach and delivers households that are hard to reach through traditional TV due to little or no viewing,” she stated.

The report noted that 20-30% of investment should be applied to streaming, regardless of these different factors. “When we’ve researched how to maximize reach among different audiences, we’ve consistently supported this recommendation. We do see audiences, like retirees, maximizing reach closer to 20% of investment in streaming, while young adults are closer to the higher end of the range. Advertisers should keep the behaviors of their audience in mind when deciding on strategies, but a foundation in traditional TV is important to achieve the scale of reach,” she added.

With this latest version of the report, “there’s a great opportunity to see what the common elements are among our highest-reaching multiscreen campaigns to be sure those are being included in advertisers’ strategies,” Hagerty explained. “These high-reaching campaigns shared several factors, including consistent advertising across endpoints and time of day – emphasizing the importance of advertisers following the audience where and when they are watching to maximize reach.”

Understanding the full media landscape is crucial to campaign success. “If an advertiser has been waiting to adopt a multiscreen strategy, the time is now as our data shows that it is becoming increasingly important to combine traditional TV and streaming. If an advertiser has a multiscreen campaign in development, I recommend verifying that your campaign is using traditional TV as a foundation and is inclusive of strategies that reach audiences consistently across many endpoints,” she concluded.

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The opinions expressed here are the author’s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.