Television advertisements can be the most effective pieces of commercial art ever created.

The annual Cannes Festival of Advertising is the world’s showcase for all forms of advertising. The power of 30 seconds of sight-sound-and-motion was fully evident during screenings for all work entered in the Film, Film Craft, and Titanium and Integrated Lions categories, which I was fortunate enough to attend last month.B Hundreds and hundreds of campaigns which had previously been exposed to millions and millions of individuals around the world were shown as part of these screenings.

Yet, given the depth of creativity applied to commercials today, why does it often seem like there are so many bad commercials airing on TV today? The fragmentation of TV is at the heart of this problem.

Today’s audience panels are sufficient to measure broad-reaching network TV viewing and many of the most popular cable networks during prime time. But cable programming now accounts for a majority of television viewing, and non-prime dayparts account for a majority of cable viewing.B Small panels are simply insufficient to measure this fragmentation. There are hundreds of viewing choices available to the average consumer, but many of those choices as much as 40% of viewing by our estimate go essentially un-measured.

Large brands conventionally avoid this advertising inventory, and consequently cable programmers and cable operators rely heavily on direct response advertisements. With few exceptions, direct response commercials are far from the quality we saw in Cannes. Low quality creative is undoubtedly grating to audiences and (unfortunately for cable programmers) probably causes audiences to tune away.

We believe that better approaches to measuring television viewing will solve this problem, increasing the chances that commercials viewed by consumers at any time of day and on any network are as engaging and creative as those seen on network prime time. Happily, many companies are working on solutions today.

At Simulmedia, we have established a panel involving millions of set-top boxes, enough to accurately measure all television viewing across the country. Because our set-top data panel is highly correlated with Nielsen’s panels, we can identify Nielsen targeting attributes across all television advertising inventory including that inventory which otherwise goes unmeasured. Between our approach and the efforts of others, we think many large brand advertisers will ultimately become comfortable buying audiences during times of the day and on networks which may otherwise have deemed undesirable.

There is an ongoing creative renaissance in television advertising the world over. As a result of the industryb’s efforts to improve measurement of viewing, Americans will get to see more of this creative renaissance for themselves.

(This post originally ran on MediaPost’s Media Daily News Commentary on July 7^th, 2011.)

Electronic Super Highway by Nam June Paik

The chart below demonstrates the benefit of using Simulmedia Segmentsb” targeting in promotional plans, based on results of an internal study of recently launched programs. Using anonymous set top box data, we first examined promotion exposure by segment during the eight weeks prior to the showbs original air date. We then looked at the first episode of the program and examined average tune-in for two different groups: Overall audience exposed to the promotions, and Simulmedia Segmentsb” exposed to the promotions and previously designated as the most receptive to these programs.

Results show that Simulmediabs data-driven predictive models consistently have a higher response rate than existing promotion plans. Furthermore, the targeted and untargeted exposed groups watched the same amount of the given network in the preceding eight weeks, suggesting that the response discrepancy is, indeed, the result of our targeting rather than simply the result of differences in television consumption.

Targeted advertising works, and moreover, the benefits are widespread.B Advertisers clearly benefit, as they can efficiently target their desired audiences rather than wasting money on audiences that are unlikely to respond to the promotions.B Viewers benefit as well.B They are reminded about shows that they already like and are informed about new shows that they would probably enjoy.B Targeted advertising even helps the TV networks that carry the promotions, since viewers are less likely to change the channel during a commercial, and potentially not return to that network, if they are intrigued by the programs advertised in the promotions.

The key remaining question, particularly for advertisers, is how to most efficiently target the desired audiences.B Online advertisers can pinpoint specific individuals who just bought a dog, or a home, or just got married, and can advertise accordingly, spending money to reach only the users who are most likely to respond to the ads.B Television advertising is more difficult.B Target audiences can be located and reached, but only by also reaching viewers who are less likely to respond.B Everyonebviewers, advertisers, networksbloses when advertisements are shown to the wrong people.B Through continued data collection and analysis, we can work to reduce this waste and improve the situations of numerous parties in the television world.

The promotional response rate is calculated by using this formula: