The future of television is now. We have entered a new era of TV everywhere. In your living room. In your office. On your laptop. And everywhere you go, your smartphone is with you.

In addition to television’s ubiquity, we’re also experiencing the golden age of content — countless hours of shows and clips geared toward hyper-focused interests and aimed at targeted demographics. Not only is this unlimited access to content for consumers highly entertaining, it also represents a significant opportunity for advertisers.

What we know anecdotally about how quickly the landscape is evolving is reflected in eMarketer’s latest Q2 2018 Digital Video Trends report. Because digital video ad spending is accelerating so quickly, eMarketer has issued revisions to estimates made as recently as the third quarter of 2017. These revisions represent a 21 percent upward correction in projected digital video ad spending for 2021 and a 6 percent downward correction in projected TV ad spending for 2020.

While these projections reflect the increasing importance of a digital strategy in an era of fragmented viewership and other challenges for linear TV, they also reflect the increasing convergence of linear TV and digital video. Digital solutions such as advanced TV continue to blur the lines between linear TV and streaming video.

So what exactly is advanced TV? According to the IAB’s definition of advanced TV, it’s meant to encompass interactive TV, which may appear as digital overlays on top of linear TV commercials, connected TV, over the top (OTT) and smart TVs, as well as linear addressable TV where ads targeted to specific households are inserted into live programming, and video on demand addressable – where dynamic ads are inserted into cable programs through the cable provider’s set top box.

Our firsthand experience suggests that some of the increases in spending on the digital side are coming at the expense of linear TV budgets, but more and more we find that there is less of a feeling of “us vs. them” between digital and traditional planning and buying teams on the client/agency side and more of a joint understanding that video can be effectively planned for at a holistic level across a variety of platforms.

Our brand and agency clients are executing multi-screen campaigns as part of their comprehensive video strategies. RhythmOne’s integrated solution allows advertisers to better target and reach audiences at scale across advanced TV, mobile tablet, and desktop. Consumers benefit as well from more engaging ad experiences that are optimized for relevancy, frequency, and recency.

While the buying and measurement models for advanced TV still need to get up to speed with those of the linear environment, advanced TV itself offers a host of measurement opportunities above and beyond what has been available for TV advertisers. RhythmOne offers several advanced TV measurement options, each geared toward highlighting campaign results in line with a brand’s goals. These measurement options include:

  • Brand Impact Studies. We’ve partnered with Interpret and Kantar Millward Brown on panel-based measurement to demonstrate ad effectiveness. Commissioned studies measure multi-screen brand lift broken out per screen, as well as attitudinal shifts and purchase intent, including post ad actions.
  • In-Store Attribution. Through our partnerships with Placed and NinthDecimal we can quantify campaign impact on foot traffic with details including demographic profile number of store visits, cost per store visit, exposed versus unexposed store visit lift, and in-store purchases.
  • Offline Sales Measurement. We can measure offline sales lift by product or product category using CPG purchase data from comScore through partners IRi and Kantar or via Nielsen Catalina Solutions. The value of this type of measurement allows brands to attribute sales dollars to RhythmOne advanced TV ad buys, and determine return on ad spend (ROAS).
  • TV Tune-in. Our partnerships with Samba TV and comScore allows us to offer entertainment clients the ability to quantify the impact of mobile, desktop, and advanced TV campaigns in driving tune-in to a linear TV event. Both partners allow us to measure lift in viewership of an episode, group of episodes, special program, sporting event, etc.

As viewers continue to flock to digital viewing platforms, advertisers must continue to increase their investment in the space in order to take advantage of the enhanced engagement opportunities with their target audiences that digital video provides.

Over the last decade we’ve pioneered research, led strategy and introduced industry leading solutions tools to help brands engage audiences across all screens. Contact us to find out how RhythmOne is perfectly positioned to guide brands and agencies to take full advantage of digital video’s growth and embrace digital’s convergence with TV.