Recently, I got the chance to join an expert group of marketers with the American Advertising Federation Cleveland chapter. The panel was part of an event called “Game On: The New Playbook for Live Sports Advertising in the Age of Streaming,” and to put it mildly, an audience of local business owners was eager to hear why now is a great time for them to make an investment in advertising for live sports on TV.
Before I dive into all the factors coming together to make live-sports advertising a great strategic choice for these businesses (and how to harness those factors), I need to note that this is a new development. Only with the digital targeting and measurement functionality of CTV are most smaller advertisers well-advised to test these waters, which were previously the domain of big brands.
The subtext: most local businesses aren’t advertising during live sports events yet. This means there’s a huge opportunity for aggressive businesses to build awareness and revenue.
Now let’s get into the whys and hows.
TV has clout
Last summer, when I was enjoying dinner out with my wife, we saw an ad for a local plumber during the Women’s College World Series. Just this past basketball season, we saw an ad for a local jeweler during a Cavs game. The bar for access has drastically been lowered, and simply being able to show up during sporting events conveys a major shot of credibility that was previously reserved for national and regional brands.
This means that you don’t need to invest in fancy, splashy creative for your ads to have an impact – you win just by showing up (as long as your ads aren’t so hokey they go viral for the wrong reasons).
CTV’s targeting is a difference-maker
With linear TV, businesses still don’t have many targeting options beyond the show and the market. CTV, which offers the ability to segment and target audiences by geo, IP address, and lookalike data, has exponentially more precision to help businesses with small advertising budgets reach exactly who they want to reach and not blow money on the wrong audiences.
To me, the right blend of targeting involves finding an incremental audience in addition to strengthening the bond with existing customers. CTV targeting allows advertisers to do this – with a bifurcation of messaging. It’s no longer one ad to many households. It could be many ads to pockets of households, if not individual households. For many local businesses, even neighborhood-based nuances could be important factors in swaying audiences to choose your brand.
You won’t have to guess at the impact of your ads
Smaller businesses usually don’t have thousands of dollars to sink into martech measurement solutions that tell them what they got from their ad campaigns. The good news is that they don’t need to do that anyway these days.
What used to be the era of walled garden measurement or even multi-touch attribution has morphed into a measurement strategy of looking at multiple data points using mixed media model studies and incrementality measurement. This helps advertisers understand the big picture – essentially, the channels and campaigns that are producing truly incremental results and not just overlapping as efforts.
Yes, there are more nuanced ways to measure TV’s impact (I write about them frequently). But as far as directional data on the impact of your campaigns goes, it’s out there for the taking, and at lower costs than you’d expect.
Let’s get started
As with linear TV campaigns, it’s a good idea for smaller brands without specific channel advertising experts to find a partner or consultant who can help guide them on things like how to use their own data, how to segment audiences, etc. We do that all day, every day at SpotlightIQ, and I’m always happy to take 15 minutes to chat about your strategy and the best way to test the CTV waters.
If you’re ready to put your brand in front of interested audiences during live TV sporting events, let’s chat.