In the digital advertising world, it is often suggested that different forms of advertising perform different functions, and that consumers are herded down the ‘sales funnel’ as they’re influenced different types of advertising. TV is usually at the top of the funnel charts, alongside words like ‘awareness’ and ‘engagement’. While TV is undoubtedly a powerful medium for both of those things, it also delivers hard sales, which is something Simulmedia, a US-based TV targeting company, have been tapping into.
A few months ago Simulmedia launched their ‘Business Outcomes Guarantee’. For every $1 million placed on its Audience Network for one month, Simulmedia will guarantee a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) against any advertiser’s designated target business outcome as compared to their concurrent TV advertising campaign. A few weeks ago Simulmedia extended the guarantee further still, and will now match the outcomes of digital campaigns.
Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, says the guarantee has been successful in helping to encourage TV advertisers take a deeper interesting in targeting. “We’re bringing a digital approach to TV and we’ve had a really good success and uptake on that, but there’s always a certain amount of resistance when you’re talking about an industry that hasn’t changed how it does things in a few decades,” says Morgan.
Demonstrating the success of data-driven TV advertising required Simulmedia to link TV advertising to offline sales, which the company does by anonymously tying set-top box data to purchase data from credit cards or transaction data from stores. Morgan says his company has found that targeted campaigns were not only working, but were “working much better than anyone understood”.
The idea for the guarantee was inspired by a client meeting. Morgan explains, “We made a proposal to one of our clients, Robert McDowall, who runs media for Choice Hotels, to run a large national campaign and he said, ‘If you believe in it so much, how about you guarantee it?’ It was then that we realised that there’s no reason why we couldn’t just go to market with this and offer it to everybody. And so we did, and we said we want to make sure that we’d make a million dollar a month commitment, which in the digital world is big but in the TV world is not so big. We had a lot of great response and then we realised we were starting to get a little pushback. People were saying, if you’re only willing to beat TV, do you believe TV can beat digital? We said yes and and so they wanted us to put our money where our mouth is there too. It makes sense, so we’re saying to an advertiser that if they run a campaign of this scale with us, that we will guarantee that the ROI, the measurable return of our campaign will meet or beat the TV schedule or the TV and digital schedule as well that will run at that time.”
