Dot the I’s, Cross the (CTV) Screens: Boost Your Metrics With a Multi-Screen Approach

Could Connected TV be the core tenet of your marketing strategy? All signs point to “yes.” Media measurement and analytics company Comscore analyzed over 400 advertising campaigns to understand the true impact of multi-channel campaigns. “As we add different platform mixes, we see that incremental lift increases,” says Tania Yuki, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Digital at Comscore. “It just goes to show that with cross-screen effectiveness, there’s a positive impact on the brand.” 

Let’s look at the key findings from this research, and what they mean for your Connected TV creative strategy moving forward into 2024. 

The Key is Three (Channels)

Earlier last year, MNTN Performance TV revealed that three or more creative assets have a compounding effect on revenue over time.

Turns out, three is a lucky number on Connected TV. Comscore’s latest research showed that when combining CTV with two or more other channels — three or more in all — a brand’s multi-channel campaign improved across brand lift, aided awareness, and most importantly, purchase intent.

Combining CTV, digital and linear TV generated a 17.5% lift in “aided awareness,” i.e. the percentage of research respondents who were aware of a product, brand, or ad before being asked. In other words, campaigns that ran on all three channels were 17.5% more likely to have made a lasting impression on their audience. This combination was especially effective at reaching Gen Z audiences aged 18-24; where the combined-channel approach increased aided awareness 6.3% for the general population, that number was 17.4% for this youngest demographic.

At What Point Does Incremental Lift  Drop Off With a Multi-Screen Approach?

“You can reach infinite incremental people from day one, and then more people early in the campaign, but what happens after a week or so?” asks Yuki. As ad fatigue sets in, incremental lift in reach starts to flatten over time,  per the chart below. It should be noted that Connected TV’s incremental lift outperformed linear TV from the outset, all the way through the first nine days of the campaign(s) — indicating that advertisers should dial in hard with CTV ad creative and be ready to have additional assets to rotate in as the lift plateaus over time.

If we hone in and assess each channel on its own, digital and Connected TV both outperformed linear TV on incremental lift. The two charts below show the positive correlation between percentage of campaign reach and channel lift. “We’re reaching incremental people on CTV and digital more often. They’re better engaged and they’re not bound to the linear television platform,” adds Yuki.

Working the Channel Mix Remix to Your Advantage

“It’s not just about mixing platforms,” Yuki says. “Where are the audiences that you want to reach? What’s the most effective way to optimize to reach them?” There are two schools of thought here: you can identify the channels, and produce creative to match each of these, then run them across different platforms. Or, you can lead with a single Connected TV solution that automatically takes into account (and optimizes for) the other performance channels in your marketing mix — and tap into a turnkey tool that generates both net-new and repurposed creatives that you can easily swap in and out over the life of your campaign. As time-starved marketers, we know which one we’d choose.