Nielsen ratings for tablets are so close to taking effect that Nielsen families have already been offered the mobile app to track tablet viewing of TV programs. Tablet ratings are anticipated to be lower than traditional TV ratings—but the ad revenue might be a different story.
When Nielsen announced they were adding tablet viewers to TV ratings last October, Nielsen executive Steve Hasker appeared on Fox Business Channel’s “Kneale on Media.” Host Dennis Kneale dismissed the ad potential of tablets, saying, “It seems like a small screen ad should not be worth quite as much as an ad I see when I’m at home watching a big old flatscreen.” Mr. Hasker’s response was surprising and is worth some analysis. “That’s a big debate,” he pushed back. “We’ll see.” And he was smiling as if he knew a secret.
That debate isn’t confined to Nielsen’s boardrooms— many advertisers and media companies alike are working to figure out just how to succeed in a multiscreen world. In fact, the IAB is hosting a panel discussion titled Tablets and TV: Mastering Twin-Screen Opportunities June 18 in Santa Monica, California, featuring representatives from Nielsen and other industry leaders including FOX, Warner Bros., Watchwith and Hulu to explore the topic.
Ad placement in tablet viewing of television shows has the potential to be even more lucrative than ad spending on a traditional TV broadcast. It’s not so much the audience size but the quality of the audience and the highly surgical targeting that a mobile second screen can offer. Consider a few of the lopsided advantages that tablet advertising offers over traditional big ad buys on cable or broadcast television.
Better accuracy
Unless a Nielsen family lives in one of the top 56 TV markets in the US, their Sweeps Month viewing is still recorded in a paper diary. While the “paper diary demographic” only represents 30 percent of the US viewing public, it’s fair to assume this methodallows a significant margin of human error to determine how $80 billion worth of ad dollars will be spent annually.
Tablets can offer a near-perfect collection of data. One cannot lie or misreport the viewing history of your tablet with the Nielsen app and unimpeachable information is instantly documented on third-party cloud servers. The Nielsen app automates the documentation of which shows a viewer has watched and for how long, leaving no room for human error.
Even the finest Nielsen ratings box cannot tell when the viewer leaves the room with the television still on. Tablets, on the other hand, offer a far higher likelihood that a viewer is engaged with the broadcast and not washing dishes or walking the dog. This likelihood of in-room viewer engagement is an advantage traditional television might never be able to offer.
Viewer engagement
On one hand, tablets may create an engagement problem for television viewers. There is all manner of research indicating thatif a viewer is more engaged with a show, they’re more likely to buy the products advertised on the show. If the viewer is swiping away at a second screen, conventional wisdom suggests that viewer is less engaged with the television show.
But conventional wisdom might be flat wrong. Second screen viewers will often use their tablet to find information about a show they’re watching or to find out what song they’re hearing in a commercial. There are reasons to believe that dual-screen viewers are more engaged with the advertising they see, not less. The idea of complementary messages on both screens at the same time is very exciting to both media companies and advertisers.
It has been demonstrated, though, that viewers who watch shows on their tablets are more engaged than viewers on any other connected device, as measured by the percentage of viewers who finish watching a given online video.
Steve Hasker of Nielsen lent credence to this theory on his Fox Business Channel appearance. “The real estate is smaller,” Mr. Hasker said, describing tablets compared to a TV set. “Therefore, there’s less that can be concentrated on that screen and the consumer is more engaged.”
We’ll know a whole lot more about the current market when we get the first few batches of tablet ratings from Nielsen.
Ad targeting
Smart TV technology is making some great strides in ad targeting, but tablets are already light-years ahead of them. Your tablet processes enough data to allow much more targeted ad delivery compared to their larger counterparts. Digital advertisers are masters of delivering the right ad to the right audience at the right time using this data.
Political campaign advertisers are learning to target certain voter blocks via Addressable TV. Their efforts are just the dawn of surgical targeted advertising on television. On tablets, though, delivering targeted ads to viewers based on location or annual income is already is a fully matured science.
We aren’t saying brands are going to spend $4.5 million for a single airing of a 30-second commercial like they do for the Super Bowl. But it is reasonable to expect brands will spend $4.5 million (or much more) for a tablet video ad campaign that employs surgical targeting, programmatic bidding and the ability to reach a consumer at the moments when viewers are most likely to buy certain products.
For more on this topic, be sure to check out IAB’s Tablets and TV: Mastering Twin-Screen Opportunities panel discussion. Joe Laszlo, Senior Director of the IAB Mobile Center, will lead a discussion including Geoff Katz of Watchwith, Neel Ketkar of FOX Broadcasting Company, Michelle Kramer of Warner Bros. and Dounia Turrill of Nielsen.