Recent advancements in TV advertising have made it highly targeted and, most importantly, affordable, even for small businesses.
In this webinar, Matt Day, creative director of video production agency Liquona, and Kurt Edwards from Sky’s AdSmart team discuss how your business can harness the impact of TV advertising with budgets that mirror those of social media campaigns.
Find out more about Liquona’s TV advert production services.
Welcome to our lunchtime webinar. my name is Matt Day from Liquona. We’re a creative production agency. And we devise all forms of digital content for all types of clients, as you would have seen in the waiting room there. And my name is Kurt Edwards. I work on the AdSmart team at Sky, and I work with hundreds of different businesses to help them navigate the world of TV.
in this session, Kurt’s going to talk first of all around how AdSmart works, and then I’ll speak around specifically what TV is really good for as part of your marketing strategy. and therefore what kind of content you might want to be making for it. So I hope you find this, interesting food for thought.
we’ll be about, probably 20 minutes, us speaking, and then we’ll take questions at the end, but during the webinar feel free to drop any questions into the chat, and David, my colleague who is helping to host this, will take them and put them to us at the end. please do connect with us. Our, details on screen there.
we’d love to continue the conversation outside of the session, of course. But first, Kurt, tell us about AdSmart. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes just really touching on the current TV landscape, but also more importantly, about how businesses of all shapes and sizes are embracing the targeted TV opportunity and are using TV to deliver sales, deliver brand fame, and ultimately deliver profit.
I’m going to start by just giving you an insight into the landscape. We’re actually in a golden era of TV content at the moment. Never have we had so much choice and the quality of content that has been delivered by multiple broadcasters is absolutely world class. So in terms of a premium environment for brands to embrace, it’s never been better.
And actually there’s lots of naysayers out there. People are very quick to say people don’t watch TV anymore. It just isn’t true. People are watching as much TV now as they have done at any point in the last 10 years, how they’re watching and what they’re watching is different. Of course, people are watching more streaming.
Of course people are watching more on demand content, but in terms of that time spent with a large screen, it’s never been greater. So for you as a brand, The opportunity to be in that sort of environment is perfect and actually one of the trends that we’re seeing, and you might think this is how you consume TV at home, the people who watch the least amount of live TV are typically the people who watch the most of on demand TV.
Okay, so most broadcasters now are able to deliver both those audiences because it’s actually quite a different mindset. And the way that you consume that content as advertisers, you can reach these audiences in lots of different ways. Now, one of the biggest challenges that we have, and we know with brands like yourselves or companies that are new to TV, ultimately you need that confidence and that sort of leap of faith to say, look, what’s TV going to do for me?
Now very few brands will ever just do a TV campaign on its own. Typically TV will be a part of an existing marketing mix. But there’s lots of research out there, not just from Sky, but some of the world’s biggest media agencies that says When you add TV to an existing marketing plan, it makes all of your other media work that much harder.
So if we take direct mail in the top right hand corner, by adding TV alongside, alongside direct mail, your DM is 20 percent more effective in delivering results. Okay. And in the current climate, everyone is trying to just eke out more effectiveness. More sales from their existing spend. Now I’m going to focus today really on AdSmart and AdSmart is the proposition from Sky, which is targeted TV advertising.
I’m going to make the assumption that most of you already do some form of targeted marketing that might be Google AdWords. And if you can use data to inform that targeting, you would do. AdSmart is essentially data driven targeted marketing just happens to be on a big screen. We are taking the best of digital, highly targeted.
Being able to track your responses and merging that with what is the best of TV, the ability to build audiences quickly in world class content. And actually, a lot of people don’t realize now, all of us on this call, we could all be watching the same program on Sky tonight and yet all of us would see different ads.
The days of us all watching the same ads as our neighbor has long gone. The fact that you can be very targeted means that you have very little wastage, but it also makes TV a lot more accessible. The starting price now for many of these brands working on TV for the first time is £3, 000 allows you to get up and running to do a TV campaign on Sky.
I’m going to show you how the technology works. So if you’re a Sky or a Virgin Media customer, you’ll probably have one of these Sky set top boxes. And on that box at any one time will sit around 50 different adverts, plus hundreds of different data points around that house. And the ad waits till when it believes it is the right time to deliver that ad.
So what we’ve got here are two neighbours. Both watching Flash Gordon Skymax and we have done one campaign targeting A young lady that we know has registered with an estate agent, another at a household that we know have got kids. So they’re exactly the same content, but they see different ads. They are none the wiser that they have been targeted with an AdSmart ad, but all of the metrics.
tell us that people respond more positively. The set top box tells us that there’s a 50 percent drop off in channel switching, and all of the other metrics tell us that people respond more positively when they see an ad that they think is more relevant to them. And one of the other things that we offer at Sky, and as I said earlier, it’s about giving people the confidence And the faith to say, look, can I try TV?
So we use data to find audiences, which I’ll touch on, but we also give world class viewability metrics. And what we say is if someone doesn’t see at least 75 percent of your ad, normal speed, then you don’t pay for it. So if someone stops, pauses, rewind, skips a channel, and that ad hasn’t played in full.
then it is deemed not to have been delivered. Yeah. So we’re trying to make sure that your money is absolutely working as hard as it can. Now, where does that data come from? We have lots of data partners, first party data, of course, at Sky, but we also bring in lots of third party data. So people like Dunhumbie with Tesco, Nectar with Sainsbury’s, Experian, sort of affluence and income data.
But what it means is for every single household, we have around 1200 different data points, so we can create really robust profiles about who it is that your customer is and who we should go after. Now, once you’ve created an audience, you can then overlay geography. Okay, so remember this is all about minimizing wastage and about being really targeted in your delivery of an ad campaign.
So it might be that you want to target by local authority. It might be that you would like to target customers in a certain postcode, or if you’re a pizza company, you might only want to target to people who live within two miles of your delivery of your restaurant because that’s all you deliver to. So the ability to be really targeted.
And hit the households that you know are your customers is what gives people the opportunity to do TV campaigns. Now some of you might say, I don’t have that type of data. I don’t know who my customer is. So one of the tools that we provide at Sky, and it’s free, and I encourage you all to take advantage of it.
If you have at least 13, 000 customer accounts, by that first line of address and postcode, we can do a profiling report for you that will give you it. a five page report on visibility about who your audience is, the makeup, the experience groups, the affluence, the income, the age and so on.
And it allows you to find that sweet spot of who it is that you should be targeting. Now I just want to do some example campaigns because I’ve talked through AdSmart and how simple it is in terms of the delivery and what it allows you to target in terms of your advertising. But here are two example campaigns.
So this company, they wanted to target people in the London area and they were after high net worth individuals that we identified using Experian mosaics. And we were able to identify 81, 000 households within the London area that they could target. And what they did was a six week TV campaign targeting 81, 000 households.
We forecast that the reach will be around three quarters of that. So remember, we are beholden on people turning on the TV. But their campaign will deliver around 360, 000 TV spots for an investment of 16, 000. Yeah, so London wide targeted TV campaign at the audience they’ve identified is perfect for them and they get a six week TV campaign for 16, 000.
The big attraction about AdSmart and the reason it’s been embraced by so many companies, it’s given you the opportunity to test TV. at a price level that you never thought was possible. If it works, great. It gives you the confidence to scale up. If it doesn’t work, then you haven’t exhausted your entire marketing budget on a TV campaign that hasn’t delivered for you.
Yeah. So the opportunity to test and learn on TV has never been greater. And I wanted to show you another campaign, actually, at the very other end of the scale. Here is a local bed retailer that, I personally work with, Sheen in Richmond, Southwest London. And They’re very particular, they’re high end beds, they want to target adults between the ages of 45 upwards, a certain degree of affluence in terms of income, but they must live within two and a half miles of the store, because he knows that’s where all his customers.
Now he identifies around 17, 000 of those households. Now, he only spends 3, 000 every quarter, so 1, 000 a month. For him, that’s really manageable. That’s another line on his marketing mix. But, for him, it gives him 100 percent share of voice in that local area as a bed retailer, yeah? And, it’s great that he can suddenly be sitting there with the big brands.
Now, I know personally, the MD there, and he’s very quick to say, look, I just can’t afford not to be on TV now. But I thought I’d just show you, here is the campaign that we’re running at Christmas. Sitting in with national brands, but very local in its delivery. Okay. So here we are West End beds Running after Lidl, there’ll be the next add on is Ancestry, both big national brands, but here is a really targeted, tight campaign in that local area from that local bed retailer.
So you can be local presence, but have a very national feel. So one of the biggest questions that we get asked all the time from sort of companies that we work with is, Look, how can I know if my campaign has worked? How can I demonstrate to my FT or to the rest of the business that the money I’ve spent on TV has delivered what I want it to?
So Sky is quite uniquely placed in this sense. That we give you very detailed reporting, so you get time of day, days of the week, the type of shows that the ads have appeared in, the type of devices that have people seen it on. So again, it gives you that confidence as the campaign goes on, how it’s being delivered.
But the most important thing we do for you is, if you are capturing sales data, and by that again, first line of address and postcode, We give you the opportunity to upload that sales data at the end of the campaign and we can cross reference your sales data with our viewing data to see whether your customers saw the TV campaign.
Yeah. So you were able very quickly to loop back and say, I spent X, I generated this amount of sales and I know the role that TV had. Yeah. So it’s really important to be able to say, look, can I show whether my investment has worked on TV? So we’re giving you data to find the right people. We’re giving you confidence.
You only pay for it if it’s seen, plus we’re giving you the tools to say, did it work? Matt, thank you for me. Yeah, cool. Thank you, Kurt. hopefully that’s raised, many questions for you, and if it has, pop them in the chat to David, who’s running the webinar, and then we’ll take those questions at the end.
for my part of this webinar, I’m going to talk about what TV’s good for, what kind of content works on TV. so you referenced spots of airtime there quite a bit. Kurt. So spots is the name for the slot that an ad sits within, and they can range in duration from 10 to 60 seconds. But for AdSmart, generally, they’re going to be 30 seconds long.
And running on the screen, you’ve got a few 30 second ads looping that we’ve produced, for AdSmart clients. and you’ll see there for brands big and small, and that’s one of the sort of exciting things about this. It, big brands alongside small brands, a great way to elevate your brand. So what specifically, is TV good for?
I think, first of all, the first point I want to make is fame. Ipsos found that TV is the advertising medium that most gets people talking. Over half of people surveyed said they talk about TV advertising that they’ve seen. Maybe you’ve done that. You’ve seen an ad and you’ve told someone about the ad that you saw.
But I suspect, in reality, probably more than, 50 percent talk about ads. I think we’ve all quoted a TV commercial at some point. Once you pop, you can’t stop. Because you’re worth it.
You should flick your hair in slow motion at that point. But, these campaigns, TV ads are part of our lives and, TV is a fame generator, but I’ve never, heard someone talk about an ad that they saw online or reference it.
It’s not part of our culture in that same way. So why do people engage that deeply with TV ads that they talk about it? and I think it’s because TV ads make an emotional connection, they make us laugh, cry, think, and they do that because of the way we’re watching them, we’re watching them in the TV space.
It’s dedicated time set aside to be entertained, informed, it’s really unique in that space. Possibly the only exception to that would be cinema in a similar way. We’re there. dedicated to consume content as richly as possible. it’s not a space like, online, for example, where you have to pester for attention or it’s an annoyance.
there is an expectation to, to be entertained. Volume right up on a surround sound system for it to look as big as possible on the biggest TV that you’ve got, etc, We don’t watch it in mute. Like we do with social ads. So there’s that chance for, engagement for, for multimedia to, to engage the senses in the richest possible way.
And that is where your ad is being served up. So that’s the first thing. It’s great for fame because people talk about it because they engage more deeply than they do elsewhere. And the second point I wanted to pull out about the content on TV is that it gives credibility. so the question is, which sector do you think spends the most on TV advertising?
Ahead of cars, cosmetics, and food. It’s digital. Online businesses spend the most, as a sector on TV advertising, which is fascinating. So Amazon, eBay, Uber, JustEat, all those kind of massive brands, names that are synonymous with digital disruption, taking their business to the online space. rely heavily on TV advertising for fame and credibility.
and I think also viewers know that there is a high barrier to entry for TV advertising. You have to be honest about what you say. It is regulated. Now, in the production process, we manage all that for you and make sure that any claims being made on TV can be substantiated. but viewers know that.
so if you see it on TV, there’s an expectation that it must be true. And there is a credibility with TV that there isn’t elsewhere. So those are two key points to pull out for what TV is good for. So if that’s what it’s good for, what kind of content do we want to be making? Because of the way people are consuming TV, and in order to get best cut through and most memorability, you want to be engaging people’s heart and mind.
Emotional content, not just informative. TV advertising started with just information, information about a soap product or something like that. and that kind of still has its place where you just inform about products and try to get a direct response and an instant sale. You maybe see some of those ads in the daytime, they’re called DRTV, direct response TV ads, where you’re looking to get that sales straight off the back of some information about the product, but the thinking really now tends to go that.
brands and products need to be established into our lives with consumers and people want to associate values with that brand and decide where they’re going to place it in their in their mindset. so brand pieces are typically where a lot of, companies will start. and on screen. Now we made all of these ads, sadly, apart from the Lloyd’s bank ad playing top, right?
but you can see that as a really good example, as are some of these others of, brand ads of. Lloyds Bank are literally saying we are here for you, Britain. We’ve always been here for you, Britain. in the midst of everything that’s as British could possibly be. Here we are. We’ve been with you on this journey.
sometimes in brand commercials, you don’t even see the product. you’re certainly not seeing any banking going on here. when Land Rover celebrated their, 70th anniversary, their brand piece didn’t even show a single vehicle. so it’s interesting to see how if you can just connect with people emotionally, you position the brand as part of.
our lives. Emotional engagement, I’ve touched on that, and that is how you position a brand, what values or emotions you’re going to hinge on the brand. That can be things like nostalgia, humor, a little bit of sadness maybe, empathy, authenticity. Ultimately it’s having some personality, that we can relate to.
More about that in my case study next. It’s at the briefing stage that we so it’s important to be asking the right questions, before making, your ad to make sure we’ve got emotive content as well as being informative, but emotive content from the start. We’ve got a document that aids that process, that briefing process.
It’s one of our giveaways, on this session. So just message myself or pop it in the chat if you’d like to get our initial questionnaire, which asks these kinds of questions. So to wrap up, I’m just going to share a case study. This is a case study for Kershods, a London and Surrey based estate agency with 21 branches.
And they wanted to use TV to launch a new service, Kershods Prime, aimed at the premium end of the market. So they wanted to introduce that brand, to their audience. but also to try and get more stock, to try and get people selling their high end homes through Kershawds. more about selling through them than buying through them.
They needed the stock. That was the challenge. so this is the first ad that they’d done. So we got them through the process, starting with that initial questionnaire. They knew their brand, and they knew their key messages, but they didn’t know what they might possibly want, They’re a TV ad to be like, so we helped them with that.
We developed some options, got their feedback, and we settled on this approach you can see on the screen. it’s a direct talking approach. there’s a seller who’s a broad, relaxing, trusting Kershawds to just get on with it, because this kind of seller really wants a high level. of service. the seller is someone with personality.
There’s a little bit cheekiness there. they connect with us by looking at us directly. That’s still a very effective approach. I engagement is a good way to engage people after being massaged. or in fact, we opened with a scene of, of a holiday. It looks like a holiday, actually a surprise.
It’s not a holiday. This. It’s just a bit of library footage that we use, and we then cut to her on holiday having her massage. But, it was actually filmed in a Heathrow Hotel, atrium, as you can see. a bit less glamorous than, we might have liked, quite fancy for a trip to the Bahamas. But nonetheless, really cost effective way to set a scene and tell a story.
if I click on this, you can see something of how, AdSmart and in fact, Kurt, you worked on this, made the ad work for its money. It’s just a glimpse of the, sort of reporting that, Kurt was touching on that the client got. and planning that audience very much is a collaboration, between yourself, the client, us for the content that’s going to work for that audience.
And AdSmart, identifying that audience. So this was, unsurprisingly targeted at people in, high affluence homes. people who were homeowners, of course you’d need that. And, selecting postcodes within two to three miles of the Kershaw’s offices. And the, frequency was about eight times. So the ad really did start to take root, on this one.
and the media budget was just over 10 k, so really cost effective. I’m gonna play the ad, and then we’ll talk a little bit more about the results. So here’s that 32nd ad. This isn’t an advert for a holiday, although doesn’t it look fair? It’s an advert for selling your premium home through SID’S Prime.
A senior member of their firm looks after you from start to finish, and their marketing was awarded the best in the uk. So there’s not really a lot for one to do except act like I’m selling my home. Ooh, stressful. Trust your sale to Kershaw’s Prime. Premium Property. Expert Ease.
So I could explore, the sort of emotion and information coming across there, but there are facts there, information, brand values being attributed to that brand and that service throughout. So across two campaigns that they ran, with an audience of 000, a reach of 77 percent was achieved. As Kurt says, people have to be, turning the TV on to, for it to be served up to them.
and with almost 201, 000 impressions, that resulted in additional valuations coming through for Cushod. So that was amazing. And they told us that those, valuations then themselves generated attributable sales, which resulted in commission of 500k circa, for them. Really, probably one of the best results that we’ve experienced with an AdSmart campaign, highly targeted and really cutting through, obviously the creative cut through on that.
But once the ad is made, it can be used over and over again. It’s not that, yeah, it has to be a different ad each time. The client did actually do a supplementary ad, to continue the story, and, and if you were to look on our website, Google that, you’ll find that. and on that second campaign, they did something a little bit different, Kurt, didn’t they?
Maybe. They used 20CI. What’s that? Yeah, so one of our data partners is a company called 20CI, and what they do is they have access to lots of residential data, so people that would have registered on platforms like Zoopla, or Purplebricks, or registered with local estate agents. So we were able to target people that were in that moving cycle of wanting to move or looking to move.
Or are keen to move in the next six months. So we overlaid that with the affluence and the age. And again, just refine the approach and just deliver more effective results every time. Yeah, brilliant. Okay. We’re gonna wrap up there and then take any questions. so I hope that has shown or piqued some interest that TV advertising really could be relevant as part of your campaign arsenal.
and as always, we have to take a multi platform approach. All these things multiply each other. but hopefully this has been a nice surprise that TV advertising could be something that you could be using. if you’d like to explore that further, here’s the steps that you might take. Steps one to three are free.
They don’t cost you anything. You’d be, why wouldn’t you request a free media plan, from Kurt and look, see what a budget could do and, how they might leverage their insight and data to, set your audience, ask us for some, sample creative, what kind of creative might work, complete or request one of those initial questionnaires, and then you’ve got all the things in hand to make some more informed decisions.
So that would be the steps I’d recommend. It didn’t cost you anything. And I reckon you might as well. We’ve enjoyed speaking at speed, trying to keep it, short for your lunch break. But, if there’s any questions there, we’ll gladly take them. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Brilliant. Thanks both.
That was really interesting. we’ve had a few questions come through already, but would encourage everyone on the call just to type any more into the Q and A section that you should see at the bottom of your screen. the first one, it’s probably best to aim it at you, Kurt. It’s, can I give a list of our own data to target?
and if so, what format does that need to be in? Yes. So the challenge you’re always going to have, the more specific you are in terms of your targeting, the higher the price goes up in terms of the minimum spend threshold that you need to do on a campaign. You can supply your own data and we can carve out existing customers, so we can make sure we don’t target them, or you can say I only want to target existing customers.
So you can do that, but the sort of level of spend needed is much higher than the 3, 000 threshold. Okay, I understand. Thank you. And just on that, if we’re, passing data over to you, what format would that data need to be in it? Is it someone’s email address? Is it their street address? So in the case of the profiling report or the sales evaluation post campaign, Both the company and ourselves will sign a data sharing agreement that’s a water type GDPR sort of contract and then we give you access to a portal that you upload your data in using an Excel spreadsheet.
Typically it’s first line of address and postcode, but you will never ever send us the data at Sky. We won’t have access to it. It’s into an independent portal and that portal will process the data. Thank you. That makes a load of sense. Matt, got one for you. in terms of the creatives that can be used, are you able to use existing footage or does it need to be shot in a specific format?
yeah, yeah, yes, you can. It can be either. It needs to be of a good enough quality, of course, to go on TV and to represent your brand appropriately, but quite often we’ll work with existing assets that clients have got. Some clients have come to us with just photos. and, we’ve been able to turn that into animated content that works.
so yeah, whatever, throw it at us. We love the challenge. That’s the sort of thing that we could discuss in one of those sample creative, calls, which don’t cost you anything. What, can, what have you got and how could we work with it? anything just to check, which obviously we would talk about on the call is that, there’s no sort of rights issues.
you haven’t used a sort of, a photographer or camera operator that, generated that content who might ultimately need some kind of payment for the fact it’s now being used on TV, if that wasn’t originally agreed, but all those things can be navigated Great. Thank you. and you just mentioned there the, free initial call, and Kurt, earlier on, you mentioned a, a report that people can use for free on the, Sky website.
Yeah. Look, it looks really amazing. The data you can get out of that. is it best for people just to email you with the email addresses on the screen or their links that we can include in the follow up email? In this day and age, there isn’t much free stuff out there, so I would actively encourage people to take advantage of it.
So feel free to just contact me direct and I’ll jump on the call with you and I’ll talk you through and I’ll show you a sample profile report that you can get. And, if you want to take advantage of it, I’d encourage you to do Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Matt, same for you as it just drop you an email.
yeah, just ping us an email. Perfect. Pleasure. Alright, thank you. Matt, you touched on this question a little bit, in the church odds example. I think you mentioned that on average, the ad was displayed eight times to viewers. Are there guidelines on how frequently people should see an ad for it to be effective?
for Kirsh odds, yeah. Kurt, you’re probably best placed. Yeah, typically most people will plan a campaign between a frequency of six and eight. post the frequency of nine, we tend to see a drop off in response rates. So most people will plan a campaign with a frequency of six to eight across a five to seven week period.
Okay, that makes sense. Thank you. and is it possible to set particular programs to run ads in between? No. this is the fundamental difference between what AdSmart is and what traditional TV advertising is. with AdSmart, you’re buying an audience. With traditional TV, you’re buying into a genre, a content, or a program, or a channel.
once you’ve identified that audience, you don’t know what they’re gonna watch. they could be watching MTV on a Monday, Sky Movies Thursday, Sky Sports Sunday. But the box knows it has to deliver that ad into that house. we are dependent on what they’re watching, when they’re watching, but your ad will be delivered to them.
Perfect. All makes sense. Thank you. there are all the questions that have come through, so I’ll hand back over to you. I’ve got one last question on that, Kurt. Are there specific channels that you can identify or, maybe negative, say, not on that channel? No, so the, obviously we wouldn’t deliver ads on channels like ITV, BBC.
Because they don’t fall within our remit. But the one channel that we never deliver ads, smart ads on is Sky News. Yeah. Just because of the, sort of the news agenda, should something happen that isn’t, doesn’t create a good environment for advertisers, we need to be able to take those ads off that channel very quickly.
So we tend to stay away from Sky News, but otherwise. Your ad will appear in all of the best channels that we have, in the best programs we have, in the peak times that we have, in front of the people that you say matter to you. They say you buy an audience, yeah. Great, okay, I think that’s probably it from us then.