By Cory Treffiletti, CMO of Rembrand
I was having a conversation with a media planner last week, and it started with a familiar complaint: “We’re spending more on TV than ever, but it feels like we’re shouting into the void.”
Does that sound familiar? Are you disheartened by the ROAS you get from TV, but deep down you know you have to spend there, or else your role is going to be suspect? You’re not alone. The reality is that your TV investment is probably performing exactly as designed. The problem isn’t your TV buy. It’s what happens when the commercial break starts. Your buy is reaching the right people, it’s building frequency, and driving awareness, but at a smaller scale than you would like because, simply put, the audience isn’t fully paying attention anymore.
89% of viewers leave the room during ad breaks. 88% skip ads when they can. 81% switch channels the moment your spot comes on (source: Innerscope Research, Nielsen, Amsive articles). These aren’t new stats (you can find variations of them all over the internet and from every source imaginable), but they’re worth repeating because they represent a structural problem that no amount of better targeting or smarter creative can fully solve on its own.
The answer isn’t scrapping the way you do TV media buying. It’s augmenting it. That’s where In-Content Advertising enters the picture. In-Content Advertising, also known as Virtual Product Placement and the newer area of Virtual Out-Of-Home, creates a lot of data that tells a pretty compelling story about what happens when you pair it with your existing TV spend.
Every Metric Goes Up (Yes – all of them)
Kantar is a great source of data on this topic, having worked with a number of companies in the space of In-Content Advertising (ICA), In-Scene Media and Virtual Product Placement. Kantar has run live control/exposed research across campaigns in the US, UK, and Germany to test a simple hypothesis: what happens to brand performance when you add In-Content Advertising to an existing TV spot campaign?
The results were not confusing in any way. Adding ICA to TV spots delivered averages of +19% in ad awareness, +7% in consideration, and +7% in favorability. These are incremental lifts on top of established brand baselines, making them particularly meaningful. If you’re an experienced marketer, you know how hard it is to move the needle on consideration for a mature brand. Seven additional points in a competitive media environment are impactful. That is a strong ROAS in itself, but we don’t need to look at it in isolation. There’s more.
Are You “Buying” The Data?
Brand metrics matter, but sales lift matters more. This is where the TV+ICA story becomes even more compelling for anyone who has to justify media spend.
Using re-contact methodology from companies like iSpot—surveying the same people up to 30 days after the campaign to track actual behavior—the data directly links exposure to purchase.
Consumers exposed to In-Content Advertising purchased the product from a major retailer at 56%, vs. 34% for the TV spot only, a 65% increase in purchase. Among purchases, 58% of ICA-exposed consumers bought the product, compared with 44% for TV alone; a 31% lift in purchase rate. And they spent more when they did buy: a 24% higher average cart value for TV+ICA-exposed consumers. Those also, as mentioned previously, are not nothing.
That’s full-funnel performance improvement. Same campaign, same audience, measurably better outcomes from awareness through to cart size.
Are You “Paying Attention” To The Data?
Most marketers still talk about reach and frequency, right? The funny thing about that is reach is a proxy metric used to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of different channels and spend. Reach is great, but reaching an audience ignoring your ads is no good. You want attention, more than reach,
Overall, the data suggest that Linear TV content captures 67% of visual screen attention. On the other hand, TV advertising only captures 33% of the attention. CTV and VOD content is more attentive, capturing 84% attention, while the ads interrupting that content tends to get just 12%. In-Content Advertising lives inside the content, not in the breaks around it. That means your brand shows up when eyes are on the screen, and minds are engaged. That’s a higher ROAS.
In case you aren’t good at math, the aggregate of this data is clear. A standard TV spot reaches a 33% net attentive audience. TV+ICA reaches a 93% net attentive audience. That’s not optimization of your campaign. That’s a structural advantage more like cheating on an open-book test than simply improving your media buy.
Viewers Don’t Hate It (Which Changes Everything)
Here’s perhaps the most important data point in the whole conversation: 75% of viewers prefer the in-content format. Compare that to 12% who enjoy traditional advertising. 84% say brand placements fit naturally into programs. 78% find them unobtrusive.
Consumer sentiment toward advertising has been trending negative for years. Ad blockers, premium subscriptions, and banner blindness are all present in the market, which suggests that the interruptive model has a trust problem. In-Content Advertising moves the conversation in the opposite direction.
Positive ad experiences drive 45% of store purchases, compared with 35% from negative experiences. Online, ICA-exposed consumers show a 42% purchase rate vs. 26% for unexposed consumers. When people don’t resent the format, it performs better at every level.
Its An Amplifier, Not A Replacement, In Your Buys
The story matters. Nobody is saying TV is bad. In fact, TV is evolving and becoming more important than ever. The formats are what need to evolve, and the formats need to expand to attract more of the attention and eyeballs they reach. TV+ICA isn’t an argument against your current TV buy. It’s an argument for getting more from it. Your TV and CTV investment does what it’s supposed to do when you expand the package to include these complementary formats. It gets better at building reach, driving frequency, and delivering premium brand environments that deliver results for brands and performance advertisers alike
In-Content Advertising captures the attention that commercial breaks surrender. It extends your frequency into the content itself. And it does so in a format that viewers prefer rather than avoid. What other format can you think of that does all of that?
As a marketer, you want better performance across the full funnel without disrupting what’s already working in your plan. You want higher ROAS, higher ROI, and more effective engagement. For media companies, its new inventory without disrupting content or the viewer experience, and when packaged together, creates a higher perception of value, leading to more deals, bigger deals, and better performance. For consumers, it’s advertising that respects their attention rather than competing with it. It’s rare that everyone wins. This is one of those times.
Every scene is a potential brand moment. The question is whether you’re in them.
About the Author
Cory Trefiletti is the CMO of Rembrand, the leading platform for creating breakthrough formats and experiences in video advertising. He has been a thought leader, executive and business driver in the digital media landscape since 1994.
By leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and computer vision technology, Rembrand enables publishers and advertisers to unlock the full potential of video advertising, creating unskippable, high-impact advertising experiences that drive measurable results.
