Presentation: Connecting Television With Search

Editor's Notes

• #3: Picture it: The United States. Mom, Dad and their 2.5 kids just fired up NBC on the one television in the house for some Friday night family time. Golden Girls is on. The whole fam crowds together and snuggles in for 30 minutes of uninterrupted entertainment. Yeah. Right. Maybe this was like this 10 years when we only had access to one form of entertainment at a time. Multi-tasking wasn’t a thing. Marketers and TV advertisers only had to worry about other marketers and TV advertisers. There were no second screens; shoot some people didn’t even have one screen.
• #4: This is more like, right? Mom. Dad. Their 2.5 kids and their 7 electronic devices. A far too familiar picture that probably hits too close to home. We scold the millennials for this type of behavior but everyone does it. In 2015 Nielsen ran a study of more than 30K global respondents and 58% of them said they browse the Internet while watching video programming. Another 47% of them said they engage with social media while watching video programming. We don’t know how to be entertained by only one thing at a time now. We’re constant consumers of content, and that’s made it harder for us marketers.
• #5: Now, we’re not just competing with other marketers and advertisers. We’re competing with things that have never historically been competition. Video games. Social media. News. Text messages. Snap chats. Sometimes we’re even competing against ourselves with other types of our own content on our other media channels. We’re not competing for media placement anymore. We’re competing for attention, and frankly that’s an even scarier competition.
• #6: Plus, we don’t really get any credit as marketers. Marketing can’t be that hard, right? Just throw up a 15% off promo on our Facebook page and watch the money start rolling in! I wish my job was just liquor and guessing; It would be a hell of a lot easier; and probably even a little more fun. You could credit a handful of different reasons for why non-marketers think marketing is easy but I think it largely had to do with people, and maybe even some people in our industry, over simplifying a customer’s path to purchase.
• #7: For example: I want a vacuum for Christmas, which is quite possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever admitted to a room full of strangers but that’s what happens when you become a homeowner. There’s this misconception that this is what I would do when I want to buy a vacuum. I go to Google and shop “vacuums.” Panasonic – I know that brand. It’s top of the list must be great. Oh wait, but here’s something for under $100 and it has 4.5 stars. I like that better.
• #8: OK On Kohl’s I know that brand. This looks good. 215 reviews. Picks up most dirt, dust and debris. Of course that must be true because it’s on the Internet. Yeah, let’s purchase this one.
• #9: OK let me just fill out all of my information. Oh awesome I’m saving $8.95. Boom. Deal of the day right there. And oh while I’m at it of course I’d love to give you more of my personal information and create an account with you so you can continue to send me more stuff. (I do want to go ahead and apologize to Kohl’s for messing up their analytics because you know there’s some poor data junkie stressing out about why I got this far and didn’t complete my purchase and will set up a whole new string of A/B tests to figure out why.)
• #10: That doesn’t happen. Ever. Maybe at once point, it used to, when content wasn’t as readily accessible as it is now, but that’s not the nature of the beast we’re dealing with now.  For me, this is how my path to purchase actually got started.
• #11: With this little guy. This is Jax. Don’t let his face fool you, he loves Christmas. He also loves to shed.
• #12: That’s when a Roombo commercial came on Hulu while I was watching Jimmy Fallon one night and I was looking at my dog-hair invested carpet that I swore up and down to myself that I had just vacuumed last week. Yup, it was time: I needed a new vaccuum.
• #13: So what did I do? I went to Google, but I didn’t search “vacuums.” I don’t want just a vacuum, I want the best vacuum. So I scroll a little bit, see what’s interesting, oh hey I like this one let’s see what happens.
• #14: And I did read that article. But I also ready no less than 4 other source on vacuums because my journalism professors taught me better than to just trust one source: I needed to validate their data.
• #15: I then got a text message about something totally unrelated but it spiraled my attention into a 15 minute group chat conversation about who knows what I didn’t even really want to be on anyway.
• #16: That’s when I needed more wine.
• #17: OK back to Reddit. And that’s a place where one can seriously get lost. I looked at three different forums, from everything to an AMA about a vacuum repair technician to the frugal subreddit because I’m always looking for a good deal.
• #18: I then looked at 11 different websites where I could have purchased a vacuum. And that’s not even including the 10 or so sites and forums I read before I even got to what/where I could buy said vacuum.
• #19: And then I went to Facebook because I got bored of reading about vacuums after 45 minutes. And that’s when the remarketing started happening.
• #20: And that whole spiral got started with one little TV commercial (and one hairy dog). And the beauty of all of this whole thing (terrible thing depending on how you look at it) is that I didn’t, not did I ever, have any intention on buying a vacuum right away. This was all research. Someone else (hopefully) will get credit with the purchase because they’ll click on the one of the three links I gave them of the products I liked the most and buy directly from there. And of course, single-touch attribution modeling will credit direct traffic with that point of sale. Of course, the really crappy thing is for Roomba because I didn’t even want, or even consider a Roomba.
• #21: Or what about YouTube? Or Streaming Services? We also have more control over when, where and how we not only watch TV but with anything. We have access to content on our own terms. And we like it, and we’re not going to give it up. To really understand how TV is impacting not just search but the entire digital landscape, we have to stop thinking of TV in one dimension. It’s not just the flat screen on your wall. It’s on your phone. It’s on your DVR. It’s through an app. It’s even online. YouTube is the second largest search engine, behind Google itself.
• #22: And when people are watching this TV they’re not giving it their un divided attention. We know that they’re browsing the internet or accessing social media but they’re not just waiting for commercials to reach for their device. They’re doing it at all times. Maybe not during The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones but…..
• #23: It’s not just search that’s getting affected by TV. Because when something big happens on TV, people immediately take to social media to talk about it. Watching live TV has become a real-time social event that that isn’t just constricted to our living rooms. From that same Nielsen study, 53% say they like to keep up with shows so they can join the conversation on social media, and 49% say they watch live video programming more if it has a social media tie in.
• #24: There is no such thing as a linear path to purchase anymore because users are influenced at any time of day by any particular medium that triggers something in their pyshce of “hey I need that.” It’s not just a second screen we’re battling. It’s a second, third and fourth screen and that has a tremendous impact on the way we market to customers.
• #25: For one, you have to appeal to things beyond a customer’s sense of logic. When users become consumers, meaning when users start shopping for things beyond what they need for basic survival (food, water, education, shelter), they want things that make them look smart, look better, looking more powerful and they make purchasing decisions based on other organs of their body. This is what luxury brands do so extremely well.
• #26: Secondly, you have to rethink your strategy. And I’d wager most people in this room are running a mulit-channel strategy. This inherently creates a competition between channels, mainly a competition that will boil down to getting bigger budgets.
• #27: Your channels are just staying siloed in their own swim lanes running whatever content they want;
• #28: And that involves a deep understanding of your users. What are they thinking about. What influences them? What do they care abou twhen it comes to looking smarter, better, stronger?
• #30: People aren’t just searching for your brand name when they see your commercial because they may not remember the brand itself. They’re going to search for the solution you’re providing them, IE non-branded keywords. I was talking with Matt Lawson yesterday who runs the performance ads for Google and he was talking about insurance companies.
• #31: Ensure you’re ads are on publishers’ sites where your users might surf during commerical breaks. - Do you know what other websites your users read most often? You should.
• #32: Make sure the keywords you’re bidding on matches the keywords you’re using within your TV scripts. That’s what people are going to remember and ultimately search for because there’s a big difference in SERP results for “all day breakfast” and “breakfast all day” and they’ve used that consistent messaging across all of their digital properties.
• #33: How many people have heard of flower towers? So back in 2013, Home Depot ran a TV commercial introduction a new style of gardening: The flower tower in order to help increase our pots, planters and live good sales. What we weren’t expecting was that we would have created a whole new way of gardening but that’s exactly what happened through one TV commercial.
• #36: We worked with the Rhett and Link at Good Mythical Morning, a YouTube Series, to help us prove this and they created a LifeProof Carpet Tuxedo.
• #38: Henry wasn’t just seen on TV. We integrated him and his story throughout our entire shopping experience so make sure the recognition was there.
• #39: And it’s working.
• #40: Dodge Durango. Anchorman 2. October 2013. Ran series of these ads.
• #43: Of all the cars Lincoln sold in October 2014 (the month after the campaign), 25% of them were MKCs.
• #44: Marketers view the Superbowl like retailers view Black Friday. On this one given Sunday, you have 110 million viewers who not only are engaged watching on TV but these 110 million people are writing 25.3 million Tweets. They’re writing 265 million Facebook posts, comments and likes. Users now not only expect great TV commercials but they expect engaged spots on social. It’s the one day of year you have people actively asking to be marketed to. Of course, that means a field day for us marketers, but it’s also gotten to the point that we have to be even more clever to “break the Internet” on this Holy Day of Marketing.
• #45: Esurance was one of those brands. And they did it by putting a digital twist on one of the oldest marketing moves in the book: A sweepstakes. The rules were simple: Tweet “#EsuranceSave30” for a chance to win $1.5 million. The brilliance of course being that it ran this ad immediately following the game, saving 30% (or $1.5 million) rather than running it during the game. 200K entries streamed in within one minute of the spot airing. Not 24 hours later, 2.4 million people entered. It generated 1 billion impressions and increased their follower count from less than 10K to more than 155K. And people started searching.
• #47: Let’s take a look at another Super Bowl Campaign. The Old Spice Guy. We all know him, and the best part about this was that it didn’t even air during the Superbowl. It aired on YouTube, and yet it was still one of the most talked about ads of the Super Bowl in 2015.
• #48: It was so popular that 6 months later, they took it another step further and did direct response videos to questions people asked the Old Spice Man on Twitter. They posted 186 personal video messages to more than 2,00 submitted questions in a 48 hour period, which included a marriage proposal and a particular love interest with Alyssa Malano.
• #50: For 9 months out of the year, the NFL owns the No. 1 ranking for “fantasy football.” But beginning in September every year like clockwork, ESPN and Yahoo take the No. 1 and No. 2 position for “fantasy football.” Why? Now there’s certainly I can’t make a direct correlation but you better believe that’s when they both start heavily TV and digital ads. FanDuel. Individual coupon code for every TV commercial they run.
• #51: OK last one. Oakley Sunglasses, but let’s see if we can guess what made that spike occur end of year 2010.
• #52: The Chilean Miners were recused in 2010 and Oakley, in total genius move, supplied them all with sunglasses to wear when they were coming out of the mine after 69 days in darkness. This was covered extensional on practically ever national news coverage and they donated $15K worth of product to the 33 miners who came out of that tunnel, giving it about $41 million dollars of exposure, exposure and TV coverage they didn’t even directly pay for. To use the reach of video and TV, it doesn’t just have to be with advertising.