Scaling Customer Acquisition on TV

Simulmedia’s Chief Product Officer Preetham Mallikarjuna moderated “Cracking the Code: Scaling Customer Acquisition on TV”, a breakout session at the IAB Direct Brand Summit on November 20th. The conversation featured TV experts Jennifer Halloran, Head of Marketing at MassMutual Financial Group; Shaun Farrar, Senior Director of Global Media at Monster; and Sam Bloom, GM of Interactive at Camelot Strategic Marketing and Media.

The conversation covers best practices for navigating from ‘just getting started’ to ‘always on’ with TV advertising, optimization strategies dependent upon brand goals, attribution best practices and pitfalls, and the key planning, buying, measurement decisions marketers should anticipate when buying TV, and much more.

For those just hoping to catch the highlights, we’ve selected some takeaways from the panel below.

1. TV is more than brand-building, it's also capable of brand-measuring.

Preetham addresses how most people view TV as purely a branding channel and turn to other channels for customer acquisition. Direct brands like the ones on the panel, however, can attest that reporting and measurement capabilities now allow brands to look at downstream business outcomes. Sam says he now holds TV accountable in the same way he does with other channels.

2. Just having access to the right insights isn’t enough - marketers need to equally consider storytelling when planning a campaign.

Jennifer says marketers should embrace the art and science of TV because messaging and targeting must work together.

3. Patience is key.

Each brand on the panel shared a different strategy for campaign success but all agree that having the patience to gain significant signal on which spots performed best and worst before optimizing is critical. Sam defines success as learning to make more efficient future campaigns, adding that just because you can optimize daily doesn’t mean you should. He says a “peanut-butter” approach, like spreading dollars over a long period of time, isn’t beneficial for his campaign learnings because he learns more from testing reactions in narrow spots. Meanwhile, Shaun says an “always on” approach is critical for Monster’s success.