By: Dean Chandler

For the first seventy years of TV advertising’s existence, you only needed those two letters “T” and “V” to know what you were going to get – a massive audience where you could share your brand message at scale. Throw your ad “spot” (we’ll get back to that word later) on anything from The Milton Berle Show to American Idol…then just sit back and start taking orders until the phone stops ringing.

TV advertising owned that corner, and everyone who lived on the corner spoke the same language -- GRPs, statistical sampling, panels, pre-logs, post-logs, etc. – and everyone accepted the (now) seventy-five-year-old measurement of ad exposure to determine value of that ad spot.

Suddenly, after seventy years, streaming TV has moved in over the last decade with all of its TLAs (that’s three letter acronyms) like “ACR”, “DSP”, “CTR”, and “VCR”; impression-based, audience targeted campaigns and new world measurement capabilities that connect every user action to a result. Creating a new currency and value system.

Is this the end of the neighborhood? Is this new noisy neighbor going to destroy linear TV? No. Did the phones stop ringing? Literally, yes but metaphorically, no. People still trust ads shown on TV (in all its forms) more than any other medium.

Diray understands how to get these neighbors to play nicely together for our clients.

The potential for harmonious, neighbor-loving-neighbor living lies in the differences and what they bring to the neighborhood pool party.

Diray is the lifeguard on duty.

Linear and streaming are bought differently but have inextricable synergies that let them play perfectly together in this new, modern paradigm of audience data and retargeting.

Linear’s role is to get large swaths of people to see the ad at scale. That “spot” buy strategy allows you to target by the show and drop that ad in front of a massive group of people all watching a show at the same time. That kind of one-time large-scale event will drive a percentage of viewers to an action (site visit or purchase). Using ACR or pixels, TV has welcomed a good time gang of interested people to the (retargeting) pool party.

Where linear buys everyone watching a piece of content, it’s unlikely more than 3-5% will ever be a “qualified” potential customer so it uses the numbers game to get a critical mass of people to the pool.

Streaming TV uses precise audience segments across hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of content to achieve the goal of filling the audience pool. Streaming targets the desired customer no matter where or what they are watching, allowing every impression to be shown to a highly qualified potential customer. This precision and the innate tracking capabilities that come with streaming TV (IP and device tracking) allows it to bring qualified guests to the retargeting pool party WITHOUT the need for them to visit a product store.

This pool of qualified partygoers can now be retargeted with sequential, down funnel messaging via efficient tactics like OLV and display on multiple devices while they are at home, at the store, at the beach or sitting at the actual, real-life pool.

Just because the neighborhood is changing and new things are coming to our corners, it doesn’t mean that they can’t share in each other’s benefits and work together in ways never imagined before that bring equal importance and value to both.

Diray can help you learn to swim in the deep end. Let’s set up a call to audit your TV everywhere strategy. We can go over ways to take advantage of a balanced and purposeful approach across all screens that drives more sales and increases your ROAS.