How to Activate the Social Alertness Effect to Raise Ratings and ROI
In this series I am providing more in-depth coverage of the information contained in the CBS presentation that Dave Poltrack and I delivered at the recent ARF Audience Measurement Conference.
In the prior post I reported that separate studies by Turner and Symphony Advanced Media, using vastly different methodologies, have discovered an increase in advertising effectiveness caused by electronic socializing while watching TV. My hypothesis as explained in that post is that while in touch with other human beings we become more present and alert, and this rubs off on attention to the TV screen content whether programming or advertising at the moment.
SymphonyAM found tightly-controlled advertising recall could be increased up to 6 absolute percentage points or up to 100% in terms of relative percent increase. Turner (Jack Wakshlag) found a 30% increase in biometric/eyes-on engagement during electronic socializing concurrent with the same brand’s ad on TV and mobile exposed simultaneously. Turner also found that when the ad is on both screens at once (not necessarily identical content) the increase in brand favorability can be as much as +132%.
Now that results have been replicated, it is time for the marketing innovators to make use of the Alertness Effect to increase the stickiness of their own shows and the ROI of their screen ads/custom content. This post will focus on the practical steps one must take to pragmatically monetize the Alertness Effect to one’s own advantage.
The industry’s systems have been built for Nielsen sex/age CPMs, with campaign sex/age reach to be the only non-judgment factor used in decision making (sometime sex/age/income). Today those systems are beginning to be joined by new programmatic systems with faster and potentially more multidimensional signals used to make decisions, allowing for feedback loops to improve TV buys in flight as is already being done in digital.
These additional potential signals can include real sales, URL visits, tuning duration increases, data on Alertness Effects and any other types of data that is found to be predictive of ROI. We have highly recommended the practice of calibrating proxy metrics used in targeting and media selection, to ROI. TiVo Research/TRA has led the field in actually doing this, finding their purchaser target concentration score the True Target Index (TTI) calibrates 0.7 to ROI, meaning a 10 point increase in TTI on average results in a 7% increase in ROI. The same thing should be done for all data used in targeting and media selection for all media.
Even in the more tightly constrained environment of the legacy systems for turning data into decisions and transactions, there is a single column set aside in Mediaocean where any number of signals can be combined into a single adjustment factor to apply to the Nielsen sex/age impressions to derive an audience size metric that is weighted to reflect, for example, Alertness Effect.
The steps therefore for the media practitioner are as follows to increase ratings and ROI:
Over time, ask your researchers to:
In the fourth post of this series we will bring to light another important emotional dimension that can be programmatically included in the perfected ROI-based buying equation of the present and future.
Bill Harvey is a well-known media researcher and inventor who co-founded TRA, Inc. and is itsStrategic Advisor. His nonprofit Human Effectiveness Institute runs his weekly blog on consciousness optimization. Bill can be contacted at bill@billharveyconsulting.com
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