How the C Suite Can Be Certain About Digital vs. TV ROAS

Despite the obviousness of the above billions of dollars have been placed in digital that would have been better placed in television and this process of shift continues to happen even though studies have shown that the larger brands are oversaturated in digital and the next dollar placed there will not be repaidBecause of the amounts of money involved some of the C Suite has some concern about this situation and would love it if there were a way to be sure which way to go in this situationFortunately there is a way to be sure and a solution to address the problemThe impact of advertising on immediate brand buying and on longterm affection for the brand turns out to be only peripherally related to how people use their time They indeed spend a lot of time with digital and often ads are busily covering a lot of the screen and the average person spends some number of calories per day avoiding looking at themThe average person39s typical attitude toward those ads is annoyance except when something about the comeon matches a lookup table in the individual39s subconscious and noticing happens If that extra fraction of a second of attention continues to resonate with the individual39s subconscious engagement may also occur Thousands of ads appear in the viewability window for every engagement that occursTelevision including streaming on the other hand is a more laid back environment in which ads if carefully matched to program contexts may receive carryover attention simply because the mood has not yet been brokenThe solution alluded to above is a method that has been used to create the entire field of science which in more clearheaded moments most human beings consider pretty darn important It is the method being used right now to create vaccines against the pandemic on which billions of our own very lives dependIt is a version of Random Control Trials RCTs known as Intent to Treat experiments ITTIn ITT one takes any relevant sample of human beings or guinea pigs or electrons etc and splits it randomly into at least two pieces which may be of unequal size ie the control group so long as it is large enough does not have to be the same size as the treatment groupLet39s imagine that one is testing advertising in regular TV vs the same premium professional content delivered by streaming vs YouTube vs Facebook Let39s say it39s a million dollars in each of the four media types One sample of IDs is used broken into four parts and each of the four media types gets its own IDs from that same original sample A final piece of the original sample gets only the media and promotion that is already falling everywhere on everybody from the brand including the four treatment groups and that is the control groupIt39s important that these IDs be ones whose purchases of the brand can be tracked by the brand or a thirdparty research company the brand uses For some brands it will not be purchases it will be acquisition given the average value of an acquisition in dollars Consumer Lifetime Value aka CLV aka LVThe analysis is simple I gave you eg YouTube a million dollars What did you incrementally give me back How many more sales or acquisitions weighted by CLV to convert to dollars the brand will get back came out of your experimental cell vs the control groupYou39ll notice that impressions are not tracked nor reachfrequency nor engagement etc These are all interim measures and in ITT they are ignored to focus solely on inputoutput economicsYou39d think that the C Suite would love to forget the quotmushyquot measurements of which it has been spectacularly skeptical and denigrating forever However perversely these quotpink blankeyquot a baby39s pink blanket stalwart metrics are now somehow missed and the typical reaction is to pull back and question the goodness of such research and to think of ways that the old ways be also added back in This is unnecessary but eminently doable In the ARF 605 Central Control Bill Harvey Consulting initiative called RCT21 participating brands are able to overlay supplemental measurements of all kindsHowever the main point is that by using ITT and ignoring interim metrics one can gain as much certainty as quantum physicists who invented television the atom bomb transistors nanotech etc had and still have Does digital deliver as much incremental return as TV or premium streaming It would not seem so based on the existing evidence yet the existing evidence has not done much to stop the gold rush to further escalate industry largesse to digital Is it time to perform one last check on this large drain or shall we keep giving more without taking one percent of one percent of the money we are spending in digital to do an ITT ARF makes it easy your own teams can learn the ins and outs of doing this science on their own after that and you will always have this valuable new certainty tool in your arsenalOr you can just keep on doing what you have been doing ignoring evidence such as thisIf you have not been spending that much in digital this chart might not apply to you These are the major advertisers in CPG Auto and QSR the top spending 510 advertisers in each category If you have been spending less in digital it might not be topped out for you ITT can tell you how much you are getting from each media type Don39t you need to confirm the results of MMM MTA and single source Haven39t you wanted toThere is no less expensive nor more bulletproof way of doing it than RCT21None of the brands reflected in the slide above have done it yet Only four of them grew market share between January 2014 and June 2019 Is that what you wantGood luck in any caseClick the social buttons above or below to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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How the C Suite Can Be Certain About Digital vs. TV ROAS

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Bill Harvey

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