
Study indicates that TV moment marketing is a cost-effective strategy for enhancing customer engagement.
Authored by LIU Jia
According to a recent report, four out of five digital marketers have launched moment marketing campaigns, or campaigns in which online ads are synchronized with offline events. Of those campaigns, more than a third synchronize online ads specifically with related TV ads (whether their own or those of a competitor) — a strategy known as TV moment marketing.
TV moment marketing requires brands to track relevant TV ads and then automatically adjust their search ad bidding strategies (e.g., the keywords and demographics they target, the amounts they bid, and their ad copy) in real time. Today, both industry giants like Google, Facebook, AT&T, and Amazon as well as niche players such as 4C, TVTY, Clickon Media, MediaSynced, and TVSquared have begun to develop products that facilitate this form of cross-channel coordination, suggesting that this marketing tactic is growing increasingly widespread. But is it effective?
Measuring Impact of TV Moment Marketing
To explore this question, I collaborated with researcher Shawndra HILL at Microsoft Research to conduct the first-ever academic study measuring the impact of TV moment marketing. We focused on an industry in which both TV and search ads are common: the U.S. pizza industry. On the search front, we leveraged datasets from Bing that included consumer search and click behavior data on sponsored ads and organic links, for both searches containing the top three pizza brands and generic searches containing the term “pizza.” Complementing this search ad data, we also reviewed daily TV ad spending for the entire pizza industry, hourly TV ad spending for the top three pizza brands, and TV ad viewership data from one of the largest U.S. TV ad providers.
Importantly, part of the challenge of measuring the effectiveness of a marketing strategy like this one is to demonstrate causality, rather than simple correlation. While many brands engage in some form of moment marketing, they don’t typically do so in a way that enables a clear comparison with a control group (and they definitely don’t share that data publicly). As such, we used data from companies that were not intentionally using this strategy, but whose TV ads were periodically turned on and off, meaning that they were essentially engaging in occasional, unintentional moment marketing. This setup allowed us to make causal inferences about the impact of TV ads on consumer search behavior and the effectiveness of search ads, shedding light on how cross-channel effects vary across advertisers and types of searchers.
Coordinating Search Ads with TV ads
Our analyses demonstrate that when search ads are coordinated with relevant TV ads, click-through rates on those digital ads increase. Moreover, we found that the reason for this trend is that the people who search for a brand’s keywords immediately after a TV ad for it airs tend to be more loyal to that brand, in turn making them more likely to click on an ad for it.
That said, it is important to note that this effect is short-lived. While consumers are more likely to click on search ads immediately after a related TV ad airs, click-through rates return to normal just a few minutes later.
This underscores the importance of automated, real-time coordination between TV and search ads. To implement this strategy effectively, marketers can use tools to detect TV ad content such as promotions, new products and services, or campaigns, and then automatically allocate more budget to search keywords featured in those ads. Rather than evenly distributing search ad budgets throughout the day, advertisers can allocate more budget during specific TV moments, helping them increase the return on investment of their search advertising spend.
Of course, TV moment marketing is just one ingredient in the mix of modern digital advertising. Marketers can also optimize outcomes by using consistent language and visuals across channels, by tailoring ads to different audience segments rather than relying on generic messaging, and by analyzing extensive online consumer browsing data to infer individual searchers’ purchase intent (e.g., whether a given user has already purchased the brand’s product or service).
Leveraging More Tactics to Boost Results
These tactics can then be paired with TV moment marketing to further boost results: For example, advertisers can personalize search ad copy to better align with the needs of different searchers triggered by the same TV moment, allowing them to upsell to existing customers but promote new client deals to new prospects. Similarly, if a brand finds that its consumers exhibit different responses to TV ads depending on the time of day, whether they’re searching on desktop or mobile, or the type of content they’re searching for, advertisers can adjust their strategies accordingly.
While our dataset was limited to a single industry, our research suggests that similar effects would likely apply in a wide range of contexts. Indeed, brands in industries as diverse as finance, retail, and travel have begun experimenting with different forms of moment marketing, indicating that our results likely hold beyond the narrow context of the U.S.-based pizza ads that we were able to study. As such, if you’re looking to optimize your ad spending, our data suggests that TV moment marketing is a cost-effective strategy to help any brand engage (and convert) its customers.
This article draws on the research paper titled "Frontiers: Moment Marketing: Measuring Dynamics in Cross-Channel Ad Effectiveness," authored by Liu Jia and Shawndra Hill.
Liu Jia is an associate professor of marketing at HKUST, with focus on quantitative marketing, which combines marketing theories with quantitative methods.