Facebook Wants to Complement TV with New Ad Metric
Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, debuted mobile tools for ad deployment across TV and the social platform. Senior agency execs seemed to like them.
It’s universally acknowledged that Facebook is a mobile-first company, and thus is considered to be a big competitor of TV as the latter fights for ad dollars. But during her panel discussion at Advertising Week on Monday, Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions at Facebook, unveiled a metric called Target Rating Point (TRP) Buying to show that TV and Facebook actually complement each other.
“It’s no longer about the shift to mobile. The shift already happened, because today people spend more time on mobile than TV,” Everson said during her presentation. “But is TV gone? Absolutely not. We believe that Facebook and TV can be very complimentary. For those campaigns where TV still plays a very significant role, Facebook can be a way to provide a much more efficient extension of the reach and drive brand metrics.”
Gross Rating Points or GRPs have been used as the metric for TV ad planning and measurement for many years. Facebook’s TRPs are the social platform’s own version of GRPs for video ads on its network so advertisers can plan, buy and measure accordingly. The company will further integrate TRP Buying to Instagram by the first quarter of 2016.
According to Everson, Facebook is comparable to TV on brand metrics such as ad memorability, brand linkage, and likeability linkage. The company’s commissioned Nielsen study of seven recent campaigns shows that, compared to people who saw TV alone, viewers exposed to both TV and Facebook demonstrated a 3.2 percentage point increase in ad memorability, an 11.5 percentage point increase in brand linkage, and a 22.7 percentage point increase in likeability linkage.
In addition to this TV-friendly update, Everson debuted Mobile Polling in collaboration with Nielsen and Millward Brown Digital on campaign effectiveness for Facebook and Instagram.
Today’s two features fall into Facebook’s larger mobile video strategy of personalizing marketing at scale, according to Everson. Nigel Morris, chief executive officer (CEO) of Americas and EMEA at Dentsu Aegis Network, said in the panel discussion that his agency has been testing TRP Buying and has seen positive results.
“We drove real value in the first test, where we delivered eight TRPs in a single day that were 14 times more efficient than a 30-second NFL spot,” Morris noted.
While Bonin Bough, chief media and e-commerce officer at Mondelēz International, also joined in the presentation and showed interest in experimenting with Facebook’s video ad initiatives. The snack and beverage conglomerate formed a mobile partnership with Facebook at Cannes this past June in an effort to grow one billion e-commerce business by 2020.
“We believe that Facebook will become our largest single selling digital channel very quickly,” Bough said.
At the same time, Bough pointed out that Facebook should “bring more engineers to the table” when the company negotiates ad deals with brands. “Our problem is that we can easily get comfortable with people who are just like us [marketers]. Facebook hires a few marketers from consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. When we sit down with them, we talk the same language so we don’t feel scared,” he said.
“But we want to know the real side of Facebook’s business. Young engineers can show us that Facebook is vastly different from our organization. That fear will get us to a different place,” Bough added.
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