Online TV is a Media Planner’s Heaven

If one thing is certain it’s that as a media planning agency we are always looking for trackability. TV, radio and newspapers have always had that elusive “I know X amount of people can potentially see it, but how many ACTUALLY did?” question attached to them…until now, well for TV anyway.

When you miss your favorite show, do you log onto the website and see if it is hosted there? I do. When it’s there, and they are becoming increasingly more available, I’ll prop my laptop up and watch the show. Apparently I am not alone in this because CBS and the CW are taking full advantage of their online properties.

CBS was able to sell $37 million in streaming ads for this year’s March Madness. This is above and beyond what they made for traditional TV advertising. I think this worked particularly well for March Madness because many of the games were played while most people were working their daily 9-5’s. Because they couldn’t be at home watching the games, they streamed them online and listened at work.

The CW is jumping on board as well. They recently announced that starting next season, all online shows will have full commercial breaks. This may upset some viewers, since many have become accustomed to one or two ads per break, but being that it will be the only place to catch up on missed shows, the consumer will adapt.

The good news about all this is that all of the views are trackable! By using the online player, you are almost 100% guaranteed eyeballs (or at the very least ears) since there isn’t any way to fast-forward, unlike with actual television. And usually, there is a link somewhere in the area surrounding the video player, to the advertiser’s website. So if the ad is interesting enough, the viewer can immediately go to the advertising company’s website.

This is a media planner’s heaven! Now I can say this many people definitely saw my ad and this many people clicked to the website because of it. If the site is equipped, I might even be able to see how many people interacted with my ad-which only makes the buy more enticing.

I don’t think it is far off that the TV networks will make their online viewers register for their streaming shows. And just think of the advertising implications! If I register my birthday and gender, the site will know that I am a 20-something female and they can target ads that a 20-something female would be interested in. They can also keep a record as to which shows I watch and target based on that information, in case I fall outside the normal likes of a person my age. This means not only will I know that X people watched it, but all of those X people are within my target market. We’ve all heard the famous quote “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half,” as we get more metric focused, we’ll only be more likely to be able to tell you which half is working!

If you’d like find out about our media planning services or marketing analytics packages, please contact us today.

Flickr photo courtesy of alles-schlumpf