Comcast Spotlight, the local ad sales arm of Comcast Cable, launched Instant Impact, a new product that gives advertisers timely feedback on the performance of ad campaigns.
Instant Impact uses attribution data from TVSquared to measure TV’s ability to drive digital activity such as website visits. With a quick turn around, an advertiser is able to optimize campaigns and get a better return on their marketing investments.
The new product comes at a time when advertisers are demanding the kind of accountability from TV advertising that they have been promised by digital media.
“As we move toward a more data-driven, audience-based approach to TV buying, connecting the purchase funnel has become an increasingly important priority for advertisers. At the local level, however, measuring lower funnel activity has always been a challenge due to much lower sample sizes compared to national campaigns. Instant Impact allows us to move past this hurdle and helps bridge the gap between TV exposure and business outcomes,” said Andrea Zapata, VP, research and insights, at Comcast Spotlight.
“What makes this such a compelling accomplishment is that we are able to offer our clients an attribution tool that works at the local level and it is also automated – therefore scalable across the thousands of local advertisers who place campaigns with Comcast Spotlight,” Zapata added.
To make Instant Impact work, Comcast Spotlight puts a pixel on the client’s website so that it can track web traffic. It measures traffic before the start of a campaign to set a baseline. Once the campaign starts, Instant Impact counts visits to the site within 30 minutes after commercials begin airing on linear TV and for the length of the campaign.
After the campaign, Comcast Spotlight can correlate the timing of incremental visitors to the website with TV advertising. Advertisers can filter the data by zones, creative, day of the week or daypart.
The data is also analyzed by TVSquared’s analytics platform.
“For advertisers used to the real-time performance analytics that come with digital, what Comcast Spotlight is doing for local cable attribution is game-changing,” said TVSquared chief revenue officer and executive VP Jo Kinsella. “Combining TVSquared’s world-class TV attribution technology with Comcast’s national footprint, local advertisers have all the tools they need to make TV a ROI-positive, performance-marketing channel.”
Comcast has already tested Instant Impact with 150 clients. Advertisers get updated data weekly and some advertisers made changes in their campaigns after a month's worth of data.
“As TV continues to transform, we must show clients how to use data to reach their customers at scale in a fragmented landscape. But we can’t stop there,” said Hank Oster, senior VP and COO, Comcast Spotlight. “We need to show them that their TV advertising is growing their business by tying awareness – which TV is so great at – to bottom of the funnel metrics. Instant Impact is a tremendous tool that does just that. We’re so excited to roll it out to our local markets.”
