Sky Media has passed another notable landmark for its AdSmart addressable TV platform, with 10,000 campaigns now delivered. 64% of addressable advertisers return for another campaign. “This indicates that addressable TV is working for businesses and successfully expanding the TV ad market in the UK,” says Sky Media, the Sky sales house. Here is another important statistic: every two days a brand that has lapsed [from using TV advertising] or never advertised on TV before selects Sky AdSmart. One of the justifications for building-out an addressable TV platform [for other operators] is the belief that new advertising money can flow to television. McLaren automotive started using TV for the first time with AdSmart, targeting just 2% of the population.
Sky Media says niche and mainstream brands are taking advantage of TV targeting – everyone from airlines to zoos, in fact. Banking group CYBG’s campaign for its mobile banking app, ‘B’, was Sky AdSmart’s 10,000th campaign and used regional targeting to serve ads to households in Birmingham and London with young professionals, high income families with children and middle-aged families. Helen Page, Group Innovation and Marketing Director at CYBG, comments: “AdSmart makes TV trackable and measurable and we have seen real benefits from the start. It has helped us to target specific audience segments while providing the insight needed to follow through to conversion.”
Sky AdSmart launched in 2014 and has established Sky as the undisputed European leader in household-level addressable TV advertising. Marketers can make use of over 1,400 targeting attributes when defining the audiences they want to target. That figure was 400 at launch. Sky Media has rightly been emphasising how advertisers are targeting into a trusted, brand-safe environment.
Sky has highlighted a forecast from the agency Mindshare (in its ‘Video eats the world’ report) showing that one-third of audiovisual advertising in the UK will be addressable by 2022. Meanwhile, as we reported in September, GroupM is working on the basis that 30-50% of the total market for TV advertising will be for addressable TV, eventually. (These figures were given out by Jakob Nielsen, CEO of Finecast, the new GroupM company focused on creating a unified access point for advertisers who want to target consumers on all television sets in the UK via what is effectively a single buy.)
Earlier this year, Sky and Virgin Media announced a strategic partnership that will enable businesses to use AdSmart targeting across both Virgin TV and Sky platforms. Advertisers will be able to target a potential audience (over time) of more than 30 million viewers and Sky has again emphasised the fact that this footprint is on a par with leading social networks. You can read more about that deal here.
Graeme Hutcheson, Director of Digital and Sky AdSmart at Sky Media says: “Addressable TV is growing the TV ad market by allowing brands of all shapes and sizes to harness the power, effectiveness and brand safe environment of TV. Because of Sky AdSmart, smaller and niche businesses are now able to compete with national brands on a level playing field. We would like to thank all our customers for their continued support and look forward to working with many more businesses that are yet to tap in the hugely successful approach to TV advertising.”
Here are some of the Sky AdSmart campaign successes that Sky Media recently revealed:
- Hilton Hotels raised awareness that booking directly on its website is simple and saved time and money. Exposed groups were 32% more likely to cite Hilton. Of those people who recalled the ad, 27% took some form of action.
- Bristol Zoo targeted households with children 0-11 years old, by cross-referencing third party data to identify families that were more likely to visit zoos and selecting postcodes that were within a one-hour travel time to the zoo.
- Peugeot ran 217 variations of its Peugeot 208 campaign to reflect local areas where the ad would be viewed.
- Easigrass, the artificial grass supplier, increased sales by 20% with the use of highly selective targeting to ensure ads were served to homes not only in their key postcode region, but also their target demographic.
- Drayton Motors, a Lincolnshire-based Kia car dealership out-performed the new car market by over 40% by targeting households in specific postcodes nearby. (Lincolnshire is a large county on the east coast of England).
- McLaren Automotive ran a pan-European digital advertising campaign to launch its Sports Series. Sky AdSmart was the only TV element used for targeting the super niche top 2% of households in terms of affluences and propensity to buy UK manufactured sports cars.
- A household brand ran a tailored campaign that targeted regions where pollen levels were high to boost awareness of its hay fever product.
- A major British airline drove awareness and consideration for its full-service tour operator. It targeted upmarket mosaics based on location and found a test sample was 25% more likely to have this operator top of mind. (Mosaics refers to the Experian Mosaic system, which is an attribute-based approach to profiling/segmenting audiences).
Interested in addressable TV advertising?
Then check out Future TV Advertising Forum in London, this December. We have addressable covered from every angle:
Normalising advanced advertising
How we strip out the additional cost and complexity associated with targeting via TV, and make addressable a more integrated part of media planning.
Addressable for everyone
How we get everyone into the addressable TV advertising business, including the free-to-air market.
