Subscribe on

Enjoy this episode? Leave us a review.

All Episodes

Episode 95

Secrets to TV Advertising Success

Broadcast TV accounts for 94% of all attention-weighted video advertising. While a YouTube ad garners just 4.5 seconds of attention on average and a Facebook ad only one second, a TV commercial commands a full 15 seconds of active viewer attention.

Elena, Angela, and Rob reveal four secrets to TV advertising success that most marketers don't know. They explore why TV remains the most effective marketing channel, discuss how audio drives TV commercial performance, and explain why traditional media buying methods are becoming obsolete. Plus, learn why looking beyond immediate results is crucial for measuring TV's true impact on business growth.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] TV delivers 2.6x more market share growth than campaigns without it

• [03:00] Why 74% of households watch both linear and streaming TV

• [06:00] The surprising power of audio in TV commercials

• [14:00] How AI-driven media buying provides 2-3x more reach

• [19:00] Why TV's most important results aren't immediate

• [20:00] The ideal split between performance and brand marketing

• [22:00] Tips for measuring TV campaign effectiveness

Resources:

2024 TV's Future is Much More Than Connected Report

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

VP Marketing

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Angela: Looking for long term impacts that are more probabilistic versus deterministic in nature is difficult and is a topic that needs more attention by the C suite.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits.

Rob: Happy 2025.

Angela: Hi guys.

Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business. Today we're talking about our favorite topic, TV advertising. We haven't published a TV-focused episode in a while, and it feels like it might be time to revisit TV and share some knowledge, because I think TV is both the most important marketing channel you could ever invest in, and also the most widely misunderstood one.

Today we'll start by sharing some recent TV research, talk about why it's so effective, and then break down how to go about advertising on TV. This episode is titled "Secrets to TV Advertising Success" - not just to get you to listen. We are going to open each section with a secret that is not widely known about TV. I'm pretty confident you'll walk away from this with some knowledge about TV that most marketers don't have.

Let's start as we always do with some research. I pulled this data from a recent report that we actually published called "TV's Future is Much More Than Connected."

I'll use some data to share our first secret to TV success, which is that broadcast TV accounts for the majority of attention-weighted video advertising. This is data that we got from Lumen Research and Dr. Karen Nelson Field. She found that video requires at least 2.5 seconds of active attention before your long-term memories form. TV garners an average of 15 seconds of attention. YouTube, on the other hand, only garners 4.5 seconds for non-skippable ads. And Facebook earns just one second of active attention.

So if you aren't invested in TV, just different forms of online video instead, you are missing out on 94 percent of all attention-weighted video advertising, which is crazy.

Total TV viewership, including linear and CTV, grew from 247 million in 2022 to more than 250 million in 2024 according to Nielsen. Speaking of linear and streaming, 74 percent of households watch both traditional broadcast and stream TV. Also, marketers might be aware of the differences between linear and connected TV or streaming TV, but according to MRI Simmons research, most consumers define TV as just "anything I can watch on my TV set." So in conclusion, despite 20 years of predicting TV is dead, it's still very much alive and very effective.

Angela: Oh my gosh. Well, that's what I was going to say. One of the most impressive stats that stands out to me comes from the IPA databank. TV delivers the highest ROI among all media channels with campaigns that include TV - like 2.6 times more effective at driving market share growth than those without TV. So that's a great feather in TV's cap there.

Rob: It's still considered the highest ranked platform for trust and brand building too, isn't it?

Elena: Yeah. I recently confirmed that stat for something on our website, but yes, it is. It's the number one medium for consumer trust.

Rob: What about the amount of adults that are still consuming linear TV? Because it seems like there's a lot of people that say, "Oh, well, who even watches it anymore?" But it's still like 90 percent of US adults are watching it.

Elena: I should have brought that data in front of me because that is a good point. A lot of people say, "Oh, linear is just watched by older generations." But actually, it is something like 80-90 percent of all Americans are reached by linear TV in a month. So yes, the viewing audience is a lot younger than you might expect.

All good stats. And I love that stat about the ROI of TV, but whenever I share that, people get annoyed at it.

Rob: Why did they get annoyed by it?

Elena: Just feeling like it's not super transparent - like what it's a pretty general stat. Like how did you get-

Rob: ROI mean?

Elena: Yeah. What did you look at? How many brands did you look at? What channels?

Angela: I'm always surprised though by how people can challenge the effectiveness of TV when you have so many research firms - the IPA, Think Box, et cetera, Aaron Berg Bass. Like it's repeatedly the number one channel in marketing. So whether it's 2.6 or it's two or it's four, it's like, are you looking at the space or are you not? And if not, are you missing something? Which I think gets into the secrets.

Elena: Right. Well, I think that's a perfect intro to this part of the episode because a lot of marketers, I think, do believe that TV is really important. They want to do it, but they're not quite sure how - like, maybe they failed in the past because it's one of those channels that it's not, you can't just wake up and say, "All right, I'm going to go on TV, I'm going to transform my business and everything's going to be great." It's not that simple because there's a lot of moving parts.

So I wanted to talk about that today, like get into some of the fundamentals of a TV campaign. And it's not going to be super easy in a short episode. So we picked just as many categories as we thought we could cover to give people a bit of a leg up.

Let's start with what I think most marketers probably think of first when they consider going on TV, which is how their brand is going to come to life on the big screen. So let's talk about creative. Rob, you knew this was going to be your section. You ran our creative group here at Marketing Architects for, I think, more than a decade.

Rob: Closer to two.

Elena: Two decades - oh my gosh, forever. So let's have you start with a secret to creative success on TV. What's something that is important for success, but maybe isn't widely known about producing TV creative?

Rob: There's so many things you could talk about, but my answer is actually going to begin from a very unexpected place and that's radio. Many folks don't know that Marketing Architects actually began in radio. Radio is obviously very different than TV. You can create and test a ton of radio commercials in the time it takes to create one TV commercial. Obviously, right? It's physics. We would literally write and produce over 180 radio commercials back in our day.

Then in 2008, we got into TV and we ironically discovered that the best performing commercials in radio were also the best performing commercials on TV. That advertising copy was so tuned to grab someone's ears, drive response. And our job for making the TV commercials, we would joke was to not screw it up with the pictures.

So why? Why was radio such a hack for making successful TV commercials? Well, years later, we've stumbled upon the studies about eye tracking in television and how the majority of people's eyeballs wander from the TV screen to their secondary devices during commercial breaks. Therefore audio is still one of the greatest weapons in TV commercials. How are you looking at the audio? How are you optimizing the audio? Can someone understand your value proposition from your TV commercial when your eyes are closed? That's a great test to do on your next TV campaign.

Angela: Surprising, isn't it? I would love to know what total percent of the TV commercials out there are leveraging audio in the way they should. We were just talking about as we started recording today, Elena, last night, you sitting with Sam and watching commercials that you really couldn't hear because there was no audio.

Elena: Yeah, he was on his phone and I kept quizzing him. "What brand was that? What brand was that?" And it's gotta be more than half. You wouldn't know. And I just can't believe we keep seeing it. So yeah, I think that's a great kind of secret to success, Rob, because if you're a marketer going on to TV, just knowing that in itself is huge. But yeah, a lot of brands still out there don't have any sort of voiceover throughout their whole commercial.

Rob: It's human nature. You know, if you think about TV, you go, "Oh, it's a visual channel," but it's multi-sensory. For sure.

Elena: Exactly. And I know that I saw some data the other day that there's even more second screening with CTV. So audio is even more important if you're advertising on CTV.

Rob: I just can't wait till when we can smell TV, you know, they add a new sense into the equation.

Elena: I know I've heard you with this smell idea. I feel like you've been bringing this up for years. Just getting blasted in the face by like different smells from your TV. All right. I want to talk about what we think are kind of the key principles for producing an effective TV spot. Because really, like, these should hold true no matter what agency you're going to work with. So Rob, what are some key principles that we try to adhere to when we're producing TV creative?

Rob: Sure. Now I always make movie references on this show and Elena will be like, "I've never heard of that movie before." But over the holidays, I rewatched "Planes, Trains and Automobiles". Perhaps one of the funniest holiday movies ever made. Elena, have you heard of that one?

Elena: I've heard of it.

Rob: All right. Well, there's a scene in it where Steve Martin is berating John Candy. And he said, "Hey, here's an idea. When you tell a story, have a point. It's so much more enjoyable for the listener." And I think that's actually a really good lesson for us as marketers. When we think about television, what's your point? Are you hoping people will go to your website? Then tell them, don't assume. Do you have a great offer? Don't hide it. Talk about it in your commercial. Leave subtle sophistication to marketers who have dollars to burn.

And it doesn't mean that you should be a used car salesman, but we should have a point and we should be persuading that point. Never forget the first 5 seconds is critical. What's your grabber? If you have an offer, don't wait until the last end frame to communicate it. Generally put an offer halfway into the commercial so you have time to seed it and make sure the person's cued to respond. How does the message strategy support the other channels? That should be obvious so that you're one plus one equals three. Be emotive, tell a story, but make sure that at the end of the day, your point is clear.

Elena: Love it. I also wanted to talk about the nuts and bolts of producing a TV commercial, which I know we don't have time to go through the whole process, but Rob, could you walk us through what you think are like maybe the most important or the hardest parts of the process to get right when you're producing a commercial?

Rob: Get over yourself. I think that is the hardest part of making TV. People get all self-conscious when they move into television, like their brand is now going to the prom. They get all self-conscious. They're like, "Oh, we're shooting a Hollywood movie." And they forget that this is an ad and an ad in a sea of other ads. So to borrow from Seth Godin, you want to be the one showing up to the dance with a purple tuxedo. Be brave, be bold, and don't overthink the kerning of the super on the fourth shot, because guess what? Nobody except you cares.

Angela: I think that leads right into pre-testing as well. It's a space where I think it could go one of two ways. You either like, this is your moment, you're going to take the big stage and you're like, "I've got this idea and no one's going to talk me out of it. I know it's right." So there's no even consideration for what the consumer set might feel or how they might react to it. Or the opposite is we're going on the big stage and we're nervous about it. So we got to play it safe. So it's a tricky thing to get right, but I think a great reason why pre-testing is so important.

Rob: A great point, Ange.

Elena: Yeah, I agree. Pre-testing I think is especially useful for our advertisers because it helps us get to a message that's also understood and clear. And that's a problem I see with some commercials. I saw one this weekend. I won't say who the brand was, but it had these two huge celebrities in it. And there was all this amazing production and the spot finished and I was like, "I don't even know what that was about. I have no idea what it was about." I just know that there were a lot of celebrities in it. And I think sometimes you're right, Rob. I love the advice - just get over yourself, keep your customer in mind. And not just this sort of pompous, like, "Oh, well, I'm going onto TV and I need the big celebrities" and that hollywood-style production and everything has to be perfect. The message is the most important part.

All right, well, let's move on to kind of the next step of going onto TV, which is buying media. So once you have your spot, you got to figure out a way to get it in front of people. And I believe that you have our secret to TV media buying success.

Angela: I do, and this one does really feel like a secret. Far too many marketers today assume TV is too expensive. You spoke to that earlier, Elena, and are really rooted in the belief that, especially for a space like linear, there are only the legacy methods of TV buying practices that have existed for decades, but that's just not true. There are new ways of buying that leverage data and AI more effectively and exclusive marketplaces, like what we built with our own media buying platform, Anika, that allow for marketers to get two to three X reach for the same dollar, which just really changes the game.

When you consider TV as a channel that you typically see the dominant brands playing in, if you can amplify your investment by two to three acts, what can that mean for your share of voice and your eventual share of market?

Elena: Love it. And could you walk us through what those marketplaces are? Because we might know them, but the general marketer probably isn't aware of that. Like Facebook buying Google ads, it's pretty straightforward, but TV, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Angela: Yeah. Especially on the linear side. In the CTV side, you're more in that space that so many marketers are accustomed to on the digital side, but when you look at linear specifically, you've got the upfronts. So this is long-term media buying. Advertisers commit to ad inventory months in advance, typically during an annual event. Generally speaking, when marketers are doing that, they're looking to either secure premium placements, they're looking to get some pricing advantages by purchasing in the upfront. But it requires a large upfront commitment and offers limited flexibility.

If your market conditions change or your business performance changes, it can be a challenging space to plan. The second would be the scatter marketplace where it's a little more short-term media buying closer to the air day. It's often this uses leftover inventory from the upfront. So it's a little more flexible, but generally CPMs are going to be higher in this space as compared to the upfront.

And then the last space that marketers traditionally think of would be kind of the remnant DR marketplace - performance driven, really focused on generating immediate responses, calls, clicks, purchases. Generally priced last, but the concern typically comes in the quality of the inventory.

So the beauty of new ways of buying, like that of what I had mentioned earlier, that can be done through Anika is that the TV media inventory that's acquired is done at a cost that's more efficient than any of these methods, but it doesn't require that upfront inflexible commitment in order to attain access to the programming. And so it allows brands to reach the households that matter for a cost that gives them a disproportionate advantage against their competitors.

Elena: Love that. That's something that not a lot of marketers are going to be aware of off the bat. So I wanted us to also talk about some universal principles for media buying, just like we did with creative. So, Ange, what are some things that marketers should keep in mind maybe when they choose a media partner or how can they blow their mind when they review their first media plan?

Angela: I think first it kind of ties back to my previous point, transparency and clarity in what's the buying method. AI-driven buying can really reduce costs and significantly maximize reach and really give that competitive advantage. So it's critical to understand how your media partner purchases inventory.

Are they relying solely on traditional methods? Are they leveraging advanced methods, platforms, DSPs, et cetera, to uncover cost-efficient, high-impact placements? Partners that are using cutting-edge technologies can provide access to unique marketplaces and just ensure better CPMs without compromising reach. So I think that one's really important.

You spoke a little earlier to this one, which is just that holistic audience reach - 74 percent of households watch both linear and streaming monthly. So marketers need to ensure that their media plans target their audience across all viewing platforms, not just one. A successful media plan should demonstrate how they combine these channels to maximize incremental reach and cost efficiency. If we can reach a consumer in one channel versus the other, let's just make sure that we're taking costs there and not having too much in those efforts.

And that really ties to the third one - everyone's talking about unified measurement across channels. So inconsistent measurements between linear, which would be more person-based versus CTV, which would be more household-based impressions can really skew results. And so understanding from your media partner how performance is going to be measured for the campaign, again, look at de-duplicated reach and frequency metrics across linear and CTV so that you can ensure you're not overspending or overexposing the same audience.

Elena: Well, speaking of measurement, that tees me up really well into our last kind of TV topic that I wanted to cover, which is you have your strategy, you've got your commercial, you've placed your spot, then you measure how it went. TV measurement is not quite as simple as measuring digital, and so this final hurdle of a TV test is where things can really go horribly wrong.

But I want to start with our secret and I'll go ahead and tee this one up. My favorite secret to TV measurement success was not easy to choose, but I picked: the most important TV results are not felt right away. TV, it is known for its immediate impact through spikes in web visits and orders, but its true power extends far beyond those direct effects. TV can improve the performance of other marketing channels like social and search. It can give you pricing power. It can build your mental availability. It can produce broader business impacts like revenue growth.

And I picked that one - I think a lot of people say that they believe in that one, but then you actually get into the nitty gritty of, no, I'm talking about pricing power, I'm talking about lifting your other marketing channels. Like these are results that I don't think people are widely aware of can come from a TV campaign. But Ange, if we want to successfully measure TV and all of its impacts, we need to be aligned with clients on certain principles, right? What would those be?

Angela: You're right. If we're not clear on those impacts that we should be looking for, it's very likely in such a complex marketing environment with so much going on that we'll miss some of those most transformative drivers of business performance. You had asked earlier about the research around TV.

And I think another data point that marketers need to be considering is that according to multiple studies, the IPA Think Box, et cetera, only about 40 percent of that total impact of TV advertising is typically measurable within the first six months of the campaign. And so that remaining impact unfolds, builds brand equity, mental availability, emotional connections that really drive that sustained business growth.

But the pressure marketers are facing related to short-term business performance really pulls us to that bottom of funnel impact. I think we're seeing that moving into 2025, even marketers expecting to feel that pressure more, perhaps even than they did in 2024. I saw in work this morning, actually a CMO survey that was done by Deloitte - found that 69 percent of budgets were being allocated to short-term performance tactics as compared with just 60 percent in 2023.

So that's unfortunate for those of us that are focused on educating the world on marketing effectiveness because we're going in the wrong direction. But what was interesting was that those surveyed stated that a 50-50 ratio was their ideal spending between performance marketing and branding. So it just suggests that their actions don't align with their mental models. They know that the brand building should be important and that those long-term impacts should be important. And yet we're being pulled to bottom of funnel and immediacy.

So in that case, we're talking about the split of all marketing channels and the focus on performance versus branding. But I think it's evidence that looking for long-term impacts that are more probabilistic versus deterministic in nature is difficult and is a topic that needs more attention by the C-suite. It could be growth in brand equity, increased mental availability, sustained sales growth and penetration, higher customer elasticity and that brand resilience. Oftentimes that can be done really well through incrementality geo testing.

I think we've got marketers looking to more methods of MMM than maybe they had favored last-click measurements in the past. So it's a tricky space, but definitely that six-plus months focus is a really important one to have.

Elena: Yeah. Well, and I think that part of the inspiration for this episode is marketers - they say they want to invest with more of a balance in short and long, but some of these like more long-term channels that marketing effectiveness really likes, they're not easy to do. So that's probably why it's a lot easier to spend more money on the short.

So hopefully this episode was helpful for people, because I think we see all the time - it's not that marketers don't want to invest in that stuff. Like they want to go onto TV, but it's not easy to make it work. I mean, we just had an episode where we could only cover a tiny part of TV.

And that's why I think that if you're a marketer and deciding what to in-house, what to outsource - I know we're a TV agency, but there's so much expertise that goes into a successful TV campaign. And TV is not bought in a similar way to digital. There are a lot of reasons to work with an expert if you're looking to get onto TV, because no single marketer can really know everything about it.

Angela: Yeah, there's probably an episode for each one of those that we could spend the whole time diving into this year. We'll have to do that.

Elena: Well, but for now, we did pile a lot in here, so I'm going to summarize quick.

Rob: That was a lot. I mean, that was a full Chipotle burrito right there with extra guacamole, double wrapped tortilla.

Elena: I'm telling you, you'll impress anybody if you come out into the next meeting and talk about TV with these secrets. So first, broadcast TV accounts for the majority - that's 90 plus percent of video attention. Second, most TV commercials are heard, not seen. Third, you don't have to buy in the traditional expensive TV media marketplaces. And fourth, the most important TV results are not felt right away.

You're right, Rob. That was a lot. So let's end with something a little bit lighter. If you could pick or had to pick one TV show to live in for just a week, which would you choose and why?

Rob: Well, I'll go first. On the History Channel, have you guys watched "Alone" where they drop people off in the middle of nowhere?

Angela: Yeah.

Rob: I love that show, but there's no way I would last a week. But I would love to be the first person that taps out before the helicopter actually lands on the place to get dropped off. Like they ran out of snacks on the helicopter and I'm done.

Angela: There's a new one, have you guys heard of, I think it's called "Extracted"? It's the same idea, but the families...

Elena: No, no, sorry. I haven't seen the show, but I saw that and I was like, I probably shouldn't share this, but there was a member of our family - I'm like, "Oh, they'd be great at making us stay in the show."

Angela: We didn't take bets on who that might be, but, no, Rob, it's like the family members are back home, but they get to watch all of the "Alone" play out. And so then they like hit the button to extract their loved one.

Rob: Ah!

Elena: Such a great concept. Oh man. My mom would be so bad at that. Like the first second, she'd be like, "They look cold, bring them back."

Angela: Well, the History Channel is getting love from us, I guess, because I chose "The Men Who Built America," which is a docudrama miniseries where it really highlights the lives and accomplishments of some of the most influential entrepreneurs and industrialists during the major transformation going on in the US - like that would be so cool to be a part of that.

Elena: Yeah. It's hard to pick for this because there's a lot of shows I'm interested in, but a week's a long time to live in like a certain time period. So Rob, I might cheat and do what you did, which is, I don't know how long I could last in this world, but I would love to go into the Game of Thrones world and be a Targaryen with a dragon when they were crushing it. I don't want to go like, I don't want to be fighting, I don't want to die. I want to ride a dragon, but I'm thinking more House of the Dragon era where they were on top. Just ride around on the dragon.

Rob: Just kind of...

Elena: Just have... just...

Rob: Burn armies up with the...

Elena: I wouldn't say that. I'm more thinking a joyride on the dragon. Alright, well, I think that wraps us up.