HKUST Business Review

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. ccording 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? Rather than evenly distributing search ad budgets throughout the day, advertisers can allocate more budget during specific TV moments. 13 HKUST Business Review