There is a significant gap between the goals of multi-screen advertising and the reality. That’s according to a study conducted by Nielsen and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA): 2013 ANA/Nielsen Optimizing Integrated Multi-Screen Campaigns.
The study found that 48% of marketers believe multi-screen advertising campaigns are very important to delivering their brand marketing messages to consumers yet only 24% have actually executed a multi-screen ad campaign. Given the fact that 88% of marketers believe multi-screen advertising will be very important within the next three years, they better get moving.
The Problem with Multi-Screen Advertising
Despite the expected skyrocketing growth of multi-screen media and content viewing, there is a reason why multi-screen advertising isn’t growing as quickly. The biggest problem according to this study is performance measurement.
Overall, 71% of marketers use a variety of tools and metrics that are specific to each “screen” to track campaign performance, which causes a decrease in productivity and measurement inaccuracies. Similarly, 71% of marketers are not managing multi-screen campaigns in a fully-integrated manner. It’s not surprising that 73% of respondents to this survey want a single, standard set of metrics that they can use to measure campaigns across all screens.
Missing Multi-Screen Metrics
Based on this study’s findings, marketers want five specific metrics to measure the performance of their multi-screen campaigns more effectively:
- Consistent methodology across media = 73%
- Real-time measures for optimization = 69%
- Ability to understand the competitive landscape = 69%
- Ability to determine if the campaign produced the desired effect = 67%
- Ability to determine if the campaign was delivered to the right audience = 66%
The Future is Multi-Screen Marketing
The world has gone multi-screen, so marketers need to widen their “screen focus” despite the massive fragmentation challenges that multi-screen viewing creates. This isn’t a new discovery. In fact, one of the 2013 brand marketing trends that I discussed here on the Corporate Eye blog this year is multiple screens. There is no going back to single screen media consumption, so your marketing plan should reflect a fully-integrated strategy and should include multi-screen advertising.
What do you think? Have you integrated multi-screen campaigns into your marketing plan yet? What challenges have you faced? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on the future of multi-screen advertising.
Image: Sean MacEntee
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
