According to the accepted depiction of the marketing “funnel”, television is a medium marketers best use to drive initial brand awareness.

But that is only because, without access to return-path data, TV has never been able to boast the kinds of user attribution that new digital media do.

Now that TVs have got connected, however, all that is changing – and a growing number of brands are recognizing that they can use TV for the same kind of precision, performance goals they have used search and social media.

Solving a problem

In this video interview with Beet.TV,  Todd Gordon, VP client development at Tatari, says that “challenger brands”, used to attributing outcomes back to exposures in digital media, are reallocating spending to TV with the same goal.

Gordon is a veteran in the industry, having pioneered programmatic TV buying at Magna Global  and later at TubeMogul/Adobe.

“They care less about the traditional TV metrics, about reach and frequency,” Gordon says. “What they care about is growing their business at an efficient customer acquisition cost.

“Over time is, as these brands scale, traditional growth channels like search, like social start to lose effectiveness. What starts out as a really efficient customer acquisition cost starts to drift, especially at the margin when you look at the cost to acquire the next brand new customer.

“At that point, they have a business problem, because they have aggressive growth goals and they’ve exhausted the channels that they know. And a lot of times they don’t really believe that TV or streaming can help them. They think that it costs too much money to do, too expensive to test, is not for a brand like them.”

Data-driven

But that is changing. Tatari is one of the companies helping to bring data-driven buying and outcomes measurement to streaming and linear TV.

Founded in 2016 and run by a team including the co-founder of Shazam, it offers tools that that isolate performance for brands.

But that measurement also finds its way to the front end, answering buyers’ upfront questions about which inventory to buy, at which price and what results to expect from customer acquisition.

It is an approach likely to become more popular – not only as challenger brands like direct-to-consumer retailers take off, but also as established brands, familiar with traditional TV, look to wring more certainty out of their spend.

Performance TV

“One thing that I really like about the performance approach is that, while audiences are important, ultimately performance is what brands are looking for,” adds Gordon.

His company’s clients include meditation app Calm, service marketplace Fiverr and e-tailer Rothy’s.

“We’re able to test and probe different types of inventory and almost put audience on the back burner, and test and see if a different approach works in terms of performance,” he says.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews