Four Ps Will Drive Future of TV Advertising

Originally posted on MediaPost

There is not much of a question that more and more companies -- buyers, sellers and intermediaries alike -- are going to use a digital approach to TV advertising. Earlier today, NBCUniversal sales head Linda Yaccarino announced the launch of the company's own audience-targeting platform for linear TV campaigns, enabling NBC to package, sell and deliver audience-denominated campaigns based on third- and first-party data sets. For example, the company would leverage Fandango data to better target, deliver and measure movie campaigns (Comcast NBCUniversal owns Fandango).

This is significant, because it tells everyone in the market that the largest seller of TV ads recognizes that the future of television advertising will not be constrained by its past. In that past, virtually all TV campaigns were bought on the basis of programs, and the only notion of audience targeting was based on broad sex/age demographics. Thus, the P that defined TV ads past, program-based selling, is now going to be supplemented by a second P, people-based selling, where audiences will be guaranteed on metrics like the number of Fandango movie ticket purchasers reached.

Will it end there, with just Programs and People? Of course not. Once you're selling people-based campaigns, wouldn't you want to add Pixel-based outcomes into the mix? For example, tying your TV campaigns to your Web analytics, to know how many people visited advertiser websites, possibly measuring how many people who received movie ads then viewed movie trailers on Fandango.

And once you're targeting, measuring and delivering TV campaigns by Program, People and Pixel, who wouldn't want to add Purchase to the list? So you would expect buyers and sellers of future TV campaigns to target, deliver, and measure campaigns all the way from the top to the bottom of the funnel, linking each and every TV impression (and digital impressions too, of course) to Programs, People, Pixels and Purchase.

TV's past might have been defined by only one P, but its future will certainly be driven by at least four Ps. That's certainly how the digital ad world works already.

What do you think? Is the future of TV advertising all about four Ps?