In a new report, Comcast Advertising’s EffecTV unit shows how over-the-top video can provide incremental reach to linear TV ad campaigns.
The new whitepaper, entitled OTT and It’s place in the TV Ecosystem, said that advertisers “need to understand where and how viewers are engaging with TV content and create cross media plans (including linear, set-top-box VOD and OTT) that reflect the consumption patterns of their intended audience."
The report notes that while OTT is getting a lot of attention these cord-cutting days, it remains small in scale compared to linear TV. However, it is a “great compliment” to linear TV in ad campaigns as a way to optimize reach and frequency.
“OTT is an increasingly important part of the TV ecosystem as viewers use multiple platforms to access their favorite content on their terms,” said Dave Pajeau, executive director, advanced platform solutions, at EffecTV. “Advertisers should look to OTT as a powerful complement to linear TV and STB VOD to take full advantage of a multi-screen strategy of reaching audiences where they are. This whitepaper reinforces OTT’s importance as well as the need for advertisers to balance their media plans based on viewership insights.”
In one sample campaign described in the whitepaper, linear TV alone reached 72% of the target audience. Adding digital video added 13 percentage points of incremental reach, with connected TV accounting for 35% of that increase.
In another example, an automotive advertisers spend 79% of its budget on a linear TV campaign and 21% on digital video. The linear portion delivered 84% of the total impressions, while digital delivered 16%. There was very little overlap between linear and digital viewership and digital provided 7% of the campaign’s reach.
In another example, an auto group in Chicago targeted four audience segments. Linear TV only reached between 67% and 71% of the targeted audience members and digital video added between 17% and 19%.
“Not only did digital help extend the reach of the campaign, but it also helped deliver households that were underexposed on the linear side,” the report found.
The report notes that OTT remains a poorly defined term that confuses the marketplace and is receiving more attention from the industry than its relative scale justifies. In its report, EffectV refers to over-the-top as an video streamed over the internet, regardless of devices, while Connected TV is over-the-top programming viewed on a TV set.
