Reaching Consumers Across Multiple Screens - Webcast

Comcast Spotlight Take Five

We hope you had a chance to attend our Take Five for Your Future webcast, "Reaching Consumers Across Multiple Screens on November 14th. If you couldn't join us, or want to review some of the information again, you can view the complete webcast here. A panel of experts shared their thoughts how they are using two powerful mediums together, television and online, to increase the reach, engagement and effectiveness of their clients' campaigns.

Mike Miller, Vice President/Advanced Advertising at Comcast Spotlight, kicked things off with an impressive rundown of how media consumption is changing, making it more difficult for advertisers to achieve their goals. One key point: while TV viewing is at an all-time high, consumption of major media, which includes internet, mobile as well as TV, also continues to grow over time, gaining nearly an hour over the past four years -- shifting that time spent from radio, newspapers and magazines. Mike also explained that while TV and the Internet are driving the majority of media consumption, increasing from a combined 66% share in 2008 to a 68% share in 2011, this consumption is also happening simultaneously. This represents a fundamental change in behavior from single-platform broadcast TV to multi-platform video viewed across multiple screens that is posing some challenges, but is also creating new opportunities to reach consumers, a point Mike made later in the webcast.

Next up was Scott Davis, Executive Vice President at Harmelin Media, sharing his thoughts on how ad campaigns are now being designed to reach consumers on multiple screens. He also discussed how advertisers can benefit by adding online video to a traditional cable campaign and how consumers are impacted by seeing an advertiser's message on two or more screens (vs. just on one).

Fraser Elliott, SVP, Media Director at Cramer-Krasselt brought the conversation to the earlier discussion on the trend towards media multi-tasking to explain how two-screen campaigns address that change in consumption and how online campaigns can be a great supplement to a TV campaign by adding incremental reach. He also discussed the challenges that advertisers are facing when planning multi-screen campaigns.

The panel discussion was rounded out by Nicholas Wootten, Media Director at School of Thought in San Francisco. He discussed how two-screen campaigns address the fragmentation problems Mike had mentioned and how online video can be used to engage consumers and create a more in-depth experience.

After an informative discussion about the trends and opportunities from our panelists, we circled back with Mike for a deeper look at how consumers can be reached through a multi-screen campaign on Comcast. He noted that because our cable customers log in to XFINITY.com to check their email, voicemail, program their DVR, remotely check in on their home security and view video content, we can more accurately segment our online ads based on their subscriber billing address. We can use an entire DMA or pinpoint an advertiser's audience through available geographic zones and target on both screens - making a multi-screen solution more effective and efficient.

That addressed the question of how to deliver the message, which naturally led to a discussion of what that message should look like—i.e., the creative part of the equation. Advertisers can re-purpose and leverage their thirty second (television) spot online by using In Banner Video, a video embedded within a standard banner ad that plays when a consumer rolls over the message, or pre-roll, displaying an advertiser's message before a short-form video selected by a viewer. This eliminates the need to come up with entirely new creative for an online video campaign and helps with brand and message recall for consumers.

Since this was an interactive webcast, we invited attendees to ask our experts more questions, and they really responded, asking about how multi-screen campaigns are measured, how budgets should be planned to account for multiple screens and more. To hear our speakers' answers to these questions and all of our panelists' insight on the changing trends in media consumption and the solutions available to advertisers, listen to the webcast.

To download the slides from this or other educational videos and webcasts, please visit: http://www.comcastspotlight.com/takefive