Advertisers’ uncertainty around ad budgets, alongside a long-term shifting in ad budgets away from linear TV, are creating tough conditions for European broadcasters in 2023. But one factor in their favour is the industry’s current focus on attention measurement.
Attention in the ad industry’s word of the year according to Fabrice Mollier, president of Canal+’s sales house Canal+ Brand Solutions. And this is a very good thing for broadcasters, as these new metrics give TV hard evidence of the value of premium content.
“We’ve always been telling advertisers that the place where you put your ads is very important,” says Mollier. But in a world of increasingly converged video advertising, the specific value of TV at times has been called into question.
It was speculated that when the subscription streaming platforms moved into advertising, they might drive the erosion further by positioning their ad offerings around individual-level targeting. As it happens, Netflix doesn’t appear to be going down this route (current targeting is very limited) – reinforcing the idea that much of TV’s strength comes from its premium content. Mollier says he’s frequently found himself saying “thank you Netflix” to his team.
And now, attention metrics are providing a way for TV companies to prove their value.
Mollier says that Canal+, at the behest of advertisers, has been working for years to prove the efficiency of its media in terms of driving outcomes. Using set-top box data to connect outcomes to TV exposures, the company has been able to do this – but this only proves TV’s short-term value.
“The good thing when we talk about attention is that it proves TV’s efficiency when it comes to branding,” says Mollier. “Karen Nelson-Field [founder and executive director of Amplified Intelligence and Professor of Media Innovation at The University of Adelaide] always says unseen is unsold, and we are proving that in terms of awareness.”
Drawing on studio resources
For Canal+ Brand Solutions, this push into attention measurement has been two-fold.
The first part, unsurprisingly, has been to start measuring the attention impact of its media. Mollier says that in the French market, it’s important that these sorts of metrics don’t stray into becoming qualitative, as there’s not much appetite amongst advertisers for those kinds of metrics.
“It’s very cultural – France is very left-brained,” he said. “We like numbers and sources. The UK is a bit different, advertisers are more open to qualitative data, but in France, nobody is buying data on brand lovers!”
Canal+ Brand Solutions has worked with an independent research company which runs post-campaign analysis via an access panel, and combines this with its own exposure data, covering individual ad spots, dayparts, channels, and genres. This enables it to measure its media’s effectiveness around a variety of metrics including awareness and consideration, and match these up to each exposure’s characteristics, demonstrating attention generated by, for example, different programming genres.
Getting this set up has taken a lot of time and investment. “This kind of measurement isn’t just plug and play, because you need data from the advertisers,” says Mollier. “It requires time – we’re the ones spending money to fund it, but the advertisers have to understand that if they want to run deeper research, it’s going to take time. It has to be a tailored approach.”
The second strand for Canal+ Brand Solutions has been developing ad formats designed specifically to capture audience attention.
For example, the company runs a format specifically around new movie releases when they first air on Canal+ – short six seconds spots and singles as part of a dedicated sponsorship of that airing. These spots are sold at a premium. and only to high end brands, and they deliver when it comes to attention.
Mollier says he’s also been drawing on Canal+’s studio assets and production capabilities for high attention ad spots.
One example was a series of ads run alongside ‘La Flamme’, a parody of the ‘Bachelor’ reality show. Canal+ Brand Solutions came up with a series of tongue-in-cheek ads which ran alongside the show, featuring its star Jonathan Cohen. The parody show proved popular and so did the ads, which were created in house. When Cohen signed up for a new series ‘Le Flambeau’, this time a parody of the ‘Survivor’ format, brands wanted in on the action again. Canal+ produced a new set of ads which ran alongside the series, again featuring actors from the show.
Mollier says one of these ads in particular, promoting Burger King’s new meat-free burger, became very famous in France, picking up a number of awards in the process. “And when we’re talking about attention, that’s a great example,” he added.
