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i n 2016, marketers are demanding accountability like never before. They have access to endless tools to connect with consumers, but knowing what actually drives sales remains essential. Matt O’Grady,

CEO at Nielsen Catalina Solutions, a company that helps CPG marketers mea-sure and improve advertising perfor-mance, hit the nail on the head when he said, “You need to connect the consumers’ response to an ad to their actual in-store purchases — that’s nirvana.”

The future of ads is about business outcomes, not media metrics. To get those outcomes, marketers are driving sales by innovating how messages are bought, tar-geted, and delivered across many chan-nels, such as search, email, display, and retargeting. But as it pertains to video, a

medium eMarketer reports U.S. adults will spend an average of 5.5 hours watch-ing every day, marketers’ expectations re-main limited. Despite video’s deep level of engagement, the majority of marketers haven’t figured out how to leverage it to drive sales and still focus on traditional awareness and brand equity metrics.

“In today’s world, marketers just can’t survive not knowing which 50 percent of their marketing strategy is working, and that applies to video as well,” says Brian Pozesky, chief product officer at Eyeview, a video advertising technology company focused on improving the return on video ad spend.

In order to build the most effective mar-keting programs, marketers must focus on the strategies that deliver outcomes — specifically, sales results. Video, often seen

merely as a way to drive awareness, can, in fact, be a powerful driver of sales. The trick comes in proving it, which is possible if marketers have the right tools.

Sales, the True ROI Marketers are ever-evolving. According to The Economist, about 70 percent of mar-keters say their role has recently shifted to being a driver of revenue. By changing their focus to sales-driven outcomes, mar-keters are held more directly accountable for their strategies.

“There is incredible value to measur-ing how well a particular campaign per-forms,” says Arianne Walker, senior director of marketing analytics at J.D. Power. “The value is in understanding S

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performance beyond online KPIs, in how specific messaging and execution helps to sell product. That’s true ROI.”

In 2014, a study by the CMO Council and Nielsen found that 95 percent of CMOs are hesitant to spend money on digital because of the inability to mea-sure ROI. Today, just two years later, available technology is allowing brands to see the true value of their advertising dollars. As a result, traditional media metrics, like impressions, clicks, and en-gagement, are losing value as sales be-comes the metric that matters most.

Relevance Is the WaySo, how do marketers connect their strategies with sales results? There is a

path (albeit one overgrown with data) from a customer viewing content to mak-ing a purchase. As daunting as that path may seem, it’s essential that marketers begin to make their way down it.

“If you deliver the right ad to the audi-ence that is most likely to purchase a product, it’s going to have a tangible im-pact,” O’Grady says. “If you bombard shoppers with ads that aren’t relevant to the end purchase, that will be a waste.” In an overly cluttered and fragmented advertising universe, relevance remains the only way to win people’s attention. The effectiveness comes from using the vast amount of data and information available to not only find the right per-son but to deliver the right message on an individual level. For example, show-ing an in-market consumer an ad for

toothpaste with a map to the nearest re-tailer can be the difference between a spot that drives awareness and a spot that drives actual sales.

“The relevance of the product is driv-en through consumer personalization,” Pozesky says. “To make something rele-vant to the consumer, you have to know something about them: their history, wants, needs — their profile. This allows you to create an ongoing and relevant dialogue, and that’s what makes a difference.”

Relevant advertising is able to tie to-gether consumer, retailer, and manufac-turer information into a message that engages an audience, wherever they may be, instead of annoying and distracting an audience with an irrelevant message in an irrelevant location. ➞

achievingHow to connect video ad spend to product sales

contributed by Oren Harnevo

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Let’s Be Honest, It’s Worked Before

The code for seeing a return on advertis-ing spend has been cracked before. Mar-keters have used data-driven methods to enable personalized, local, real-time pro-motional messaging in print circulars, online search, display, and other media. They’ve delivered their message through these tactics in a relevant way and tracked their campaigns back to sales.

There’s no doubting the effect of print on consumers — it was, after all, the first form of mass advertising, using beautiful pictures to create emotional connections with readers. In 2015, U.S. advertisers were still putting 15 percent of their over-all investment into the medium, accord-ing to TechCrunch.

With the invention of the internet came digital display advertising, and it quickly became one of the fastest — and easiest — ways to personalize advertising to a specific consumer. Right now, digital display advertising is a $32 billion indus-try in the U.S., according to eMarketer, and it’s projected to hit $46 billion by 2019. Search advertising is hot on its heels at $29 billion, taking advantage of what’s at the forefront of consumers’ minds when they take to the web.

Personalized and localized advertising executions can happen within these media, as well as other channels, like email mar-keting — a strong tactic for marketers reaching out to their current customers in order to upsell. These ads are shown in real time and are very relevant.

So, why mess up a good thing by add-ing video to the mix?

The Decline of the Status Quo

Marketers need to acknowledge the facts: advertising media that worked in the past

are starting to face some undeniable changes. They will all, likely sooner than later, reach a point of diminishing return.

While print coupons and circulars have seen success in converting shoppers into buyers, weekday newspaper circula-tion has fallen 17 percent, and the ad rev-enue that comes with it is down 50 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. This is a fall-off that marketers cannot afford to ignore.

Furthermore, with the proliferation of display and search ads, many consumers are becoming immune to these messages, with 73 percent of Americans ignoring these ad formats, according to eMarketer. That dreaded banner blindness is resulting in a loss of effectiveness, with a measly 0.17 percent average click-through rate for ban-ner ads, according to research compiled by Smart Insights.

In addition, a marketer can face a loss of consumer trust when an ad message chases a customer around the web as a re-sult of reckless retargeting.

So Where Exactly Has Everyone Gone?

U.S. adults spend 22 percent of the day, or more than 34 hours a week, watching television, according to Niel-sen. Research firm Syndacast predicts that by 2017, 74 percent of all inter-net traffic will be video.

No matter how you cut it, that’s a lot of time consuming media, and many marketers have caught on. Between 2011 and 2017, eMarketer reports, ad spend on digital video will hit $8.04 billion. By 2020,

digital video itself will account for $30 billion annually.

J.D. Power’s Walker has seen the trend firsthand: “We have been monitoring video usage among new-vehicle buyers since 2012. At that point, 14 percent of vehicle buyers told us they were using videos in their online shopping process,” she says. “Today, 45 percent of these buyers tell us they use video content to help them make decisions about their vehicle purchase.”

Video is very clearly a medium that captures people’s attention. “With video, it’s more engaging and human,” says John Stremel, director of digital media at ad-vertising agency Innocean. “It can convey so much information in a dynamic way. I get 300 emails a day, so between that and a video, a video will get my attention. It’s here to stay, and it’s growing and strong.”

Marketers have used video to drive awareness since the invention of televi-sion due to its ability to use sight, sound, and motion to drive an emotional con-nection with consumers. But, as the shift to more accountable advertising grows, using video as a sales tool has been a difficult transition to make.

Personalizing video based on the complex data sets needed to impact sales, and on the scale required to move

the needle, has seemed like an insur-mountable feat. Until now.

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checklist for ways to get your money’s worth

Eyeview uses this checklist to help brands drive sales via digital video and advanced TV. How many are you using in your video marketing strategy?

Identify and know your consumers

Leverage your CRM data to target and personalize your message

Implement tracking pixels on your website

Incorporate real-time feeds to highlight product and price offers, sales countdowns, and product features

Target based on distance to the retailer and use a localized map to direct people on where to go to complete a purchase

Use all screens and channels (e.g., desktop, mobile, advanced TV, Facebook)

Measure sales using test and control methods

Work with verified third-party measurement companies

Learn from and optimize your campaigns as they run

— O.H.

Video for Sales Is Here, Now

Smart marketers are tapping into techno-logical innovation to use video the same way they’ve used performance tactics in the past. Combine this with the high vol-ume of people consuming video — across desktop, tablet, television, and mobile — and you have a recipe for success.

“Good video advertising, in the most simplest of terms, is adding effectiveness and efficiency to traditional video using all of the new screens that are available to consumers today,” Pozesky says.

Marketers are marrying data-driven techniques with the time-tested magic of TV to create one-to-one video marketing. Measurement of previously elusive offline sales is now not only effective, but becom-ing the norm for leading marketers at top brands like Honda, Lowe’s, and P&G.

TriHonda Dealers, a regional group of Honda dealerships located in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, has firsthand experience in seeing incremen-tal sales from the use of video. Leveraging creative from Honda’s national advertis-ing campaign, TriHonda Dealers targeted local in-market auto shoppers by incorpo-rating brand, product, and consumer data to create and deliver personalized video ads across screens. The videos targeted shoppers interested in competitor models with messaging that compared key differ-entiated features of Honda’s model inven-tory against competitors’. Each video variation included a local map of the shopper’s closest dealerships, along with local pricing and offers. With the creation of more than 8,000 video variations shown to 8 million viewers, TriHonda saw a 29 percent increase in car sales, moved an incremental 912 vehicles off its lots, and saw a return on ad spend of $7.83, as measured by J.D. Power.

Partnering with measurement compa-nies like Nielsen Catalina Solutions and

J.D. Power, these brands show how mea-suring sales’ impact has become standard rather than just an afterthought. “We are able to measure actual online behavior and tie it to sales, in some cases seeing a profit of seven to one,” Walker says. “We capture exposure to an ad campaign and

connect that experience to detailed trans-action data using our online-to-offline an-alytic solutions. This type of measurement allows automakers to put a real value on their marketing efforts.”

Now, marketers can draw a clear line between the customers who viewed an ad and those who then purchased their prod-uct. “We can actually take videos meant for branding and make them work harder across the mid- and lower-funnel by add-ing more specific content to that video that’s going to drive people to buy,” says

Stremel of Innocean. “Video has flexibil-ity — the content can be optimized de-pending on where consumers are on the path to purchase, and we’ve seen strong ROI with it. We see its power, and we’re embracing it and learning from it.”

Even internet behemoths Google and Facebook are beginning to focus on using video to deliver measurable sales results. In April, Google reported that Gatorade earned $13.05 in sales for every dollar the brand spent (or put toward) YouTube’s TrueView ads, as well as a 16 percent lift in new buyers who saw the commercial.

Facebook has prioritized measuring sales lift for brands using video as well. Utilizing Facebook’s Custom and Looka-like Audiences tools, brands like Acura and Eggo have seen more than four times the return on ad spend and a significant increase in topline revenue.

At the end of the day, a medium needs to be adaptable to be effective, and video is finally able to deliver on that requirement. It can be configured and reconfigured to appeal to niche audiences at scale.

“Every campaign is different, and every run of media and target audience that you decide to pursue or create will impact the campaign,” says O’Grady of Nielsen Catalina Solutions. “We know from thou-sands of case studies that using purchase data to target your audience provides higher returns on ad spend than other ap-proaches, which is why it is important to do in-flight optimization as well as back-end analysis of your video campaigns.”

With its astronomical growth, power to connect emotionally, and advance-ments made in targeting, personaliza-tion, and measurement, video has become the biggest opportunity for per-formance marketers tasked with deliver-ing sales.

Oren Harnevo is the CEO at Eyeview. You can email him at oren@eyeviewdigital.com.