The Power of Brandformance

What is "Brandformance" in the Context of TV Advertising?

Crafting media strategies that work means balancing brand building and performance metrics. Every single dollar of a TV ad’s budget affects both brand and performance. This is the new rule of successful advertisers. This is what brandformance means.

Key Aspects of "Brandformance" in TV Advertising

Crafting Compelling Creatives: The Heart of Brandformance

How do you balance Brand Awareness and Performance? By creating TV ads that not only stick in viewers' minds but also drive them to take action. The key is striking the right balance between creative brand storytelling and measurable performance. Engaging and memorable creatives are essential for ensuring that your message resonates with your audience and prompts them to respond.

By combining the strengths of branding and performance marketing, brandformance campaigns can build emotional connections while driving tangible business results.

Strategizing for Success: The Brandformance Approach

Implementing a brandformance approach to campaigns enables advertisers to dynamically manage the entire marketing funnel. This approach ensures that no single part of the funnel is "starved" of resources. Instead, budgets can flow seamlessly between brand awareness and performance marketing, depending on which area is performing well and requires more investment.

Targeting advertising with specificity

Identifying target audiences with broad categories like “male 18-45” or “female 25-54” is outdated and ineffective. More specific characteristics are needed to create an accurate customer profile. For example, “Male 18-45 who owns a dog” or “female 25-65 who travels internationally” may lead your campaign to success.

Linear TV relied on basic age and gender targeting for so long because achieving a deep level of detailed targeting has traditionally been challenging.

To make matters worse, changes in viewership behavior, such as watching across many devices, content, and distributors, and the diminishing importance of “appointment TV,” make it difficult to reach the right people.

Strategizing for Success: The Brandformance Approach

Implementing a brandformance approach to campaigns enables advertisers to dynamically manage the entire marketing funnel. This approach ensures that no single part of the funnel is "starved" of resources. Instead, budgets can flow seamlessly between brand awareness and performance marketing, depending on which area is performing well and requires more investment.

Targeting advertising with specificity

Identifying target audiences with broad categories like “male 18-45” or “female 25-54” is outdated and ineffective. More specific characteristics are needed to create an accurate customer profile. For example, “Male 18-45 who owns a dog” or “female 25-65 who travels internationally” may lead your campaign to success. So in order to ensure your TV ads maximize impact, you must adeptly navigate (or find a partner that does) through structural and viewership fragmentation to pinpoint where your strategic audience can be found on TV.

Linear TV relied on basic age and gender targeting for so long because achieving a deep level of detailed targeting has traditionally been challenging.

To make matters worse, changes in viewership behavior, such as watching across many devices, content, and distributors, and the diminishing importance of “appointment TV,” make it difficult to reach the right people.

But with data-driven linear technologies like Simulmedia, it is possible to target a more nuanced, strategic audience definition and find them with greater precision within a more fragmented TV landscape.

In CTV, defining and locating your strategic audience is much easier due to the prevalence of audience data providers. However, sometimes, the quality of these audience providers in Connected TV can be uncertain.

Alternative methods exist. Start by examining your best customers. How do you find them? Look at the people who visit your website, make a purchase, or are in your CRM, and then find individuals with similar behavior through lookalike and act-alike models.

Reaching your strategic target audience in a brand awareness campaign increases the likelihood that this audience will convert later in your performance campaign. By getting your message to the right people and making them aware of your brand or new product, you are feeding more highly qualified audiences into your downstream performance campaign.

Optimizing both granularly and holistically

There are two levels of optimization occurring within a brandformance campaign: within a campaign (say, within the performance part of a brandformance campaign) and across the brand awareness and performance campaigns. Let’s see how that works

Within a performance campaign

Real-time optimization works for CTV within the campaigns. In Simulmedia, we use a smart AI-powered system that automatically allocates your CTV budget to the best places and times for ads. The result? Maximum efficiency and great performance metrics, like lower costs per website visit, app install, lead generation, or conversion. Why does it matter? This is the key to driving performance for CTV. Optimizing the lower funnel on CTV is essential in the performance game.

Linear TV. The hardest part for advertisers here - outside of Simulmedia, they can't get the linear TV campaign’s results fast enough to optimize instantly. Post-logs are delayed, not standardized, and difficult to ingest, process, and analyze for insight. It’s a difficult but not insurmountable issue, and by investing in the right automation, disparate data can be turned into insight much faster. By having all the insights at your fingertips faster, you can actually take a similar performance optimization approach for Linear.

This works in 3 phases

• Test and Learn `(create a campaign and run it)
• Plan and Optimize (analyze received data and turn it into insights)
• Scale and Growth (improve your campaigns permanently)

How we optmize a linear TV campaign

Across brand and performance campaigns

Connected TV

For Connected TV we utilize multi-objective optimization. Imagine setting up your campaign to optimize against two key metrics simultaneously. For instance, a health and wellness site might aim for both site visits (mid-funnel) and shopping cart transactions (lower-funnel). Similarly, an education site could focus on website visits (mid-funnel) and enrollment form submissions (lower-funnel).

This approach supports both strategic audience efficiency and performance value drivers. It appeals to audience-centric marketers who want to secure outcomes and to performance-focused marketers who don’t want to neglect any part of the marketing funnel. Ultimately, it ties together our full-funnel optimization story, ensuring a holistic and effective marketing strategy.

Linear TV

For linear TV, a hybrid campaign involves two coordinated campaigns, where we manually shift the budget between brand awareness and performance (or vice versa), depending on which aspect needs it the most.

Measure and Buy Holistically with a Brandformance Approach

To execute brandformance effectively on TV—whether linear or streaming—advertisers must embrace an always-on strategy. Using a non-always-on strategy is suboptimal for brandformance campaigns. The reason is straightforward: short campaigns don't provide enough time to go through the test-analyze-learn-adjust cycle, which is crucial for optimizing performance and ensuring sustained success.

An always-on strategy helps advertisers establish relationships to build brand awareness (to run ads in front of a large chunk of the target audience because of reach increase) and performance by turning this audience into customers.