The chief marketing officer of home improvement retailer Wickes has said that the only thing holding his business back from the ‘holy grail’ of TV advertising – the ability to personalise ads at scale – is the cost, and that on a cost-per-acquisition basis it makes more sense for Wickes to place ads on Google search or Facebook.
Speaking at the Future TV Advertising Forum on Wednesday, Matthew Gaunt said the return on investment (ROI) Wickes could make by using technology such as Sky’s addressable advertising platform AdSmart “should be huge” but the figures don’t stack up.
“There’s probably only a couple of thousand people buying a kitchen every week,” Gaunt said. “The perfect model – selling £10,000-£20,000 kitchens – the ROI on a personalised TV ad to just those few thousand people who want to buy that week should be huge but the ROI doesn’t work going down on AdSmart yet.
“Every time I look at the cost of [addressable TV] and the efficiencies we get out of it, actually the cost-per-acquisition in the current model means I would be better on Google search or Facebook.”
What does work well for Wickes, Gaunt said, is regular broadcast TV, which continues to deliver unrivalled results for his business.
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“I’m not a fan of TV, I’m a fan of things that work and make business grow and TV keeps giving back,” Gaunt said.
“If we go personalised, or go targeted, then I very often don’t get the return. But as soon as you go into the broadcast medium the premium is there.”
Sky AdSmart launched in 2014 and has established Sky as the undisputed European leader in household-level addressable TV advertising. Marketers can make use of over 1,400 targeting attributes when defining the audiences they want to target.
10,000 campaigns have now been delivered through the platform – with 64% of addressable advertisers returning for another bite at addressable advertising, proving it does work for many businesses.
Banking group CYBG’s campaign for its mobile banking app, ‘B’, was AdSmart’s 10,000th campaign and used regional targeting to serve ads to households in Birmingham and London with young professionals, high income families with children and middle-aged families
Every two days a brand that has lapsed from using TV advertising or has never advertised on TV before selects Sky AdSmart. For instance, McLaren automotive started using TV for the first time with AdSmart, targeting just 2% of the population.
