At Vision on 11 September, TV companies Channel 4, ITV, and Sky announced details of their latest collaboration: Lantern.
Lantern is a multi-outcome TV measurement initiative; a new system that will offer advertisers and buying agencies a way to measure the impact of their TV advertising activity on a host of online outcomes (web / search behaviours).
Here is an overview…
Why is Lantern needed?
Data from Profit Ability 2 shows TV is the 2nd biggest driver of immediate profit return (sales occurring in the same week as the ad exposure). So we know TV works, it’s just not easy for advertisers to measure.
Not only that but a key part of TV’s value in the modern media ecosystem is the way it supports other media activity - a large but historically unquantified aspect of TV’s value.
A system that delivers this measurement will provide the evidence growing businesses need to prove the efficacy of their TV spend to their board/financial teams.
How will Lantern work?
The initial phase will be a proof of concept that combines samples of TV ad exposure data from the 4 million home Sky panel and c. 2 million YouView homes together with outcome data from matched panellists from Measure Protocol – the UK’s largest consumer online behavioural panel company.
This PoC will provide the insight and data needed to inform the business case for a larger pilot scheme and allow the issuing of a request for proposals (RFP).
What is meant by ‘multi-outcome’?
The subsequent behaviours of an individual being exposed to a TV ad – i.e. did they go on to visit a website, search for a product? There is a broad range of online outcomes that matter to advertisers, from content consumption to searches, to site visits - both their own and competitors (in aggregate), and in some cases online sales of course. Information will be provided to advertisers in a way that means they can’t see the results of individual competitors.
When will it be available to advertisers?
As soon as possible! Lantern is still in the early stages of its development and a more detailed roadmap will be announced in the future.
What’s the benefit to advertisers of this collaboration?
Advertisers aren’t as interested in individual TV sales house performance as they are in the total TV performance. TV is bought and planned as a single channel, with the same ad unit (e.g. 30 second spots).
If TV companies were to develop their own individual systems there would be a large amount of duplication and potentially different forms of measurement, making it difficult for advertisers to assess the impact of their advertising across TV as a whole; better to work together on one unified measure of TV’s total impact, making it easier for advertisers to understand the effectiveness of their advertising.
Will this cover both Linear TV and BVOD?
The PoC will only cover Linear TV initially as that’s the largest source of impact/impression data. We will explore the possibility of including BVOD impressions at a later date, but CFlight is a good indication that approaches which involve broadcasters’ respective impression data are feasible.
How can advertisers get involved?
The Lantern proof of concept (PoC) will allow us to analyse the performance of past campaigns running on linear TV across the period July 2022 to June 2024. It is not at this stage designed for measuring the outcomes from campaigns that are currently running.
To help us understand the potential of this solution, we’re looking to work with advertisers who’ve ran a linear TV campaign across this period, who have conducted some form of measurement on the online response it generated – this will allow us to compare the results from Lantern with the existing results.
As the Lantern PoC is not operating at a full scale panel size, it will only be possible to detect the impact of TV for advertisers and campaigns of a certain type. I.e. campaigns where there was a notable impact from TV that was easily distinguishable from the existing ‘base’ activity. This means that the outcomes of large businesses with high levels of existing web traffic and campaigns with smaller volumes of TV investment are unlikely to be detectable at this stage. So, we’re particularly interested in working with small to medium sized businesses who’ve invested reasonable sums in TV across this period.
If you fit this description and you’re interested in finding out more, or if you’d simply like to tell us your opinion or even better share some data you think would be helpful, please contact andrew@mcintoshmc.co.uk
How can I find out more?
If you want more information on Lantern, please get in touch with Andrew McIntosh via andrew@mcintoshmc.co.uk.