Local Broadcasters Adapt To ‘Living In The Age Of Outcomes’

Local Broadcasters Adapt To ‘Living In The Age Of Outcomes’ - NewsLab

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Today’s immediate availability of metrics is resulting in a performance-based advertising environment that’s difficult to provide in the local linear environment. How that gets resolved is the question going forward, said a panel of executives speaking during a TVNewsCheck webinar, Attribution, AI and Optimizing Spot TV, last Thursday.

In digital environments, attribution is relatively easy to track. A person goes on a website, clicks on an ad or a link, goes to a purchasing environment and either buys or doesn’t. Digital cookies, IP addresses and other tracking methodology help marketers see what those customer journeys look like.

That is not the case in a linear broadcast environment, where a signal continues to be broadcast from a single point (or points in the case of repeaters) and received by a relatively large audience — also known as a one-to-many model. Because those signals don’t necessarily pass through a trackable device, it’s hard to deliver attribution information, other than ratings, to an advertiser. As TV becomes increasingly delivered over the internet to smart TVs and other smart devices, viewership patterns are becoming increasingly trackable, but it remains hard to drill down into demographic and targetable information at the local level. This lack of a reliable local measurement system is making it hard for broadcasters to operate as nimbly as digital marketers do, but doing so is necessary as advertisers and agencies demand more and more information about how their campaigns are performing.

Christopher Martinez

“Advertisers want to see how their advertising