Why Addressable?

Imagine you are relaunching a product in the UK; you have fought hard to secure distribution with a retailer in a 100 or so of their flagship stores spread all over the country. Your data from other markets shows your product appeals to mid and upper affluent customers in mainly urban areas. You don’t have enough budget nor need to advertise at a significant weight nationally

To make the launch successful you need to rapidly build demand; your brand is remembered in a kitsch way from the ‘70’s, but you need to update the appeal and communicate values that are relevant to a modern, highly opinionated audience telling them about the environmental benefits you now deliver. However, you only need to communicate to about 20% of UK households to be successful, but you need to communicate to them in a compelling way. You need more than digital or direct marketing; you need to change attitudes and convince people to go in store. 

This is the magic of addressable media, it delivers high quality, integrated communication, but targeted at specific consumers. It eliminates waste. 

Using data profiling techniques, it’s possible to identify high potential households using the latest census data. So, you will know which postcode sectors are most important for you and closest to the stores where you have distribution, you can start to think about which media channels are available for you to target these potential customers. 

The development of addressable media technology means all media channels are available to target to specific postcodes, so there is no compromise. 

We ran this campaign for the relaunch of SodaStream for Christmas 2018 and won the Thinkbox TV Planning Award for the best use of a small budget. 

SodaStream had won distribution in Boots, but only the top 88 stores. We profiled their potential customers using Experian MOSAIC data and ran a pre-Christmas campaign in proximity of those stores using Sky’s AdSmart addressable TV platform, local cinema, posters and hyper-local digital channels. 

We were able to retarget people in Sky homes on their smartphones via their Advance digital platform as well as other digital media. So, we built awareness, consideration and conversion, but in a highly targeted way. We almost completely eradicated waste. 

The campaign increased spontaneous brand awareness in homes reached by +49 per cent and spontaneous purchase consideration by +89 per cent, meaning SodaStream over delivered on sales targets and secured valuable long-term distribution with Boots and other retailers.   

This was 5 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. 

The campaign would now include other TV platforms; ITVX is a significant addressable platform and streaming platforms like Amazon Prime Video could have been a game changer with a link to immediate purchase. However, what has changed most profoundly is the consumer. 

The other gamechanger with Addressable Media is the ability to reach light viewing consumers who reject traditional media, like scheduled, broadcast TV. 

‘Broadcast’ TVs weekly reach declined last year by 5 percentage points to 75%. In two to three years free to air, live TV will no longer be a mass reach medium, especially to younger or lighter viewers. In the US, there are slang terms for this; cord-cutters or cord-nevers, about 100 million people who only stream. 

Already, less than a fifth of 16-24-year-olds’ weekly viewing is to live broadcasters and half of 16-24-year-olds don’t watch any broadcast TV in a week. 

This doesn’t mean viewing is in decline, it’s booming, especially including viewing via smartphones. 

Overall AV viewing is now over 4½ hours a day across all audiences and all platforms, some groups are way higher and encouragingly 84 per cent of TV viewing is via TV sets and increasing. We are not witnessing the decline of TV, but we are seeing a shift in how people watch it. 

Audiences are spread across multiple channels and platforms, and we need new rules to be able to successfully advertise to them. 

A lot of YouTube content is now viewed on TVs. People spend 49 minutes a day watching video sharing platforms. Perhaps more pertinently, audiences are switching to catchup platforms like ITVX and My4, viewing has increased 29 per cent to nearly 20 minutes a day. 

We are in the middle of a media revolution that allows brands access to consumers in precisely targeted and controlled ways. Subscription VoD (or streaming services) are now in 68 per cent of households. Netflix average viewing is 21 minutes per person per day, it now has the second largest monthly reach of any platform or channel. 

Our view is that addressable media provides massive opportunities for advertisers to communicate with consumers in far more precise and accurate ways, using relevant copy for specific groups of people and testing and leaning what is effective. 

To do this we have to change how we think, we’ve got used to planning advertising according to certain rules which are becoming increasingly redundant. We’ve built immutable, quasi-scientific laws around brand fame and mass awareness. They were only relevant to when we had free, ad-funded TV channels with little channel choice that delivered mass audiences, we are entering a post-channel world where consumers are increasingly living in tribes defined by their media consumption, often originating from social media. This means that mass awareness is impossible to achieve. 

We are entering a data and technology driven advertising world, brands need to look at the opportunities and issues involved in addressing specific messages to specific audiences…