Without retracing the history of television, it is simply worth recalling that, initially, television was taken over by advertisers who mainly wanted to work on their brand image and increase their notoriety. Television was perceived as a medium reserved for branding advertisers, whose ROI was not easily identifiable. For years, and even more so since the advent of digital technology, television has therefore been considered - wrongly - as a branding rather than an acquisition medium, whose business performance could not be measured.
Today, like digital, it has become possible to measure television's performance, generate a ROI and even optimize it from one wave to the next by optimizing its media plans. The first TV analytics solutions then changed people's minds, broke preconceived notions about television and strengthened television in its role as the most powerful media in the world.
All the consolidated performance measurements - in a pseudonymized way of course - during all these years of TV campaign analysis have allowed the market to understand the power of data and its role in the evolution and digitalization of television. Data becomes an opportunity for new measurement, comparison and, therefore, planning opportunities. A new paradigm for TV buying!
Socio-demo criteria (and therefore audience) no longer seem to be sufficient to explain purchasing behavior. Adding new data to the socio-demo criteria will greatly refine the possibilities offered to TV buying tools. The GRP data has a bright future ahead of it; in the United States, for example, NBC Universal makes 10% of its sales on GRP data, or about 1 billion dollars (!).
Even more than revolutionizing TV buying methods, data will also be one of the keys to addressed advertising. What will artificial intelligence allow tomorrow? Will it be able to go even further to send the right message to the right home at the right time?
It was clarified by SNPTV and AFMM that, as a first step, targeting would be possible in France depending on household profiles, geolocation and consumption preferences. In an addressed environment, artificial intelligence will eventually provide hyper-personalization. Contextual, first of all (depending on the television program broadcast), creative (depending on the content delivered by the spot, geolocation would allow brands to push different messages depending on the department), or individual (depending on the household to which the spot is delivered).
France Télévisions and TDF have already conducted a test on DTT in January 2018. A targeted advertisement was broadcast in the Le Mans, France, area, and several times a day, the French advertiser Thélem Assurances was able to simultaneously broadcast 2 spots: one national, the other aimed at the inhabitants of the Le Mans area. More recently, on May 7th and 10th 2019, it was M6 Advertising that conducted a test of segmented live advertising on TV connected with La Poste and its Starcom agency by broadcasting 2 different ads to 2 different viewer segments.
As mentioned in our article on the necessary adjustments to be made before programmatic purchasing can be applied to television, addressed advertising is likely to be delayed: will the first experiments be carried out by the first half of 2020? Addressed advertising is still awaited, but artificial intelligence is already being used to automate the purchasing processes. Ad plan, the first artificial intelligence solution for TV investments, introduced TV buying based on a guaranteed cost per visit that addresses the ecosystem as it exists today.