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Making TV commercials is a feat of terrible compromise. You have a great product with great benefits and features – but airtime is too costly to talk about all of them, let alone that nobody wants to watch a 10-minute infomercial enumerating a laundry list of features.
So you gotta water it down: Who are the target customers for the advertisement, what message will – on average – resonate best with them, and how can you fit the whole thing into 30 seconds? Broad message + broad audience = broadcast.
Designing a message for the masses and their averages is bound to shut a lot of people out: Those who have no need for your product. Those who don’t care about the product. Those who aren’t interested in the particular features you picked. Hit and miss is part of advertising. Or was part of it.
Alright, so broadcast isn’t quite dead yet. There is plenty of TV to go around for a long time to come, but things are shifting quite noticeably: Viewership on Hulu is through the roof. Google’s Web TV is imminent. YouTube is transmitting live sports events, and even Microsoft Silverlight is sponsoring live streaming of Nascar races and Olympic content on the internet.
Increasingly watching TV doesn’t involve the TV at all anymore.
Yet TV advertisements have– apart from gaining some color in 1954 – seen little change. Sure, advertisers have become smarter about placing their ads, identifying value propositions, increasing reach. But the basic premise is unchanged: one broad message, distributed shotgun to all viewers.
Does anyone really think it’s a great idea to show me an F150 Super cab commercial, when my IP address makes it obvious that I’m watching from downtown San Francisco? Is it really a great idea to have a show sponsored by a well-known feminine product, when I’ve clearly stated that my gender is “male”, when I registered on the site?
Sure, there is a slight chance that my wife is watching from my account. Or that I’m an avid pickup fan who just “happens to be” in S.F. at this moment. In all reality though, odds aren’t on the advertiser’s side here.
Even if you hit me up with a product I could be interested in – with all the CRM data companies have collected over the years, shouldn’t they know by now WHICH features I’d ACTUALLY care about?
Enter the narrowcast
Narrowcasting provides the unique ability to specifically cater to countless of atomic known audiences: One viewer at a time. No longer do advertisers have to craft a broad message that appeals to the largest common denominator across what they expect the viewership of their message to be (since it is all based on historical data), but instead they can apply everything they know about each actual viewer, and put it to work to speak to every one with a unique voice!
That’s pretty powerful – showcasing your product in exactly the way that is most effective for each individual viewer.
But it gets better.
Stop thinking about delivering the right speech for a single product, and consider that many companies have more than one brand in the race. Watch some TV in the evening and take note how many ads are really from the same company, just a different division, brand, or product line.
With narrowcasting there is a huge opportunity for marketers to leave the individual, separate budgets and marketing efforts for each brand and product behind, and look at how to best split up the “total population” among their portfolio instead.
Let’s take your run-of-the-mill multinational (say Johnson & Johnson), and observe the amount of commercials broadcast over the course of an evening for any of their brands: Acuvue. Listerine. Neutrogena. Carefree. Rogain. And so on.
On TV, these are shown to everyone watching, indiscriminately . But how much actual overlap is in the target audiences for these brands and products? Would you show Acuvue to someone with 20/20 vision? Rogain to a teenager? Carefree to men?
What if you could automatically and instantly decide what is the “best” product to advertise to each individual viewer as well as the message and fashion to do it? What products across your entire brand and product portfolio would you choose to advertise to 45-year-old Females from New York? The product with the highest margin? The brand with highest likelihood of being purchased? The product range with the greatest lifetime customer value?
How would your product portfolio look, if spread out on a multi-dimensional graph. Do you really want to show your newest hair coloring products to all men? Even to all women? Would you tell every viewer about the same features? Or is there things you would tell blondes, brunettes, or red-heads differently if you’d know who’s watching?
It’s a whole new world with exciting potential once you start jotting down a message delivery matrix across divisions and products…
It’s good to live in the future!
Mark / @muuque
