Unlike digital advertising, it can be very difficult to tie TV ads to business outcomes. Traditional post-campaign TV ad reports lag behind analytics from other channels leading to slow performance insights that stifle TV optimizations. For Wayfair, this just wouldn’t cut it.

In a recent webinar during the Attribution and Analytics Accelerator event hosted by The ARF, Lana Koretski, Director of TV & Online Video Marketing at Wayfair, explained how her team overcomes TV measurement challenges by integrating real-time TV ad data into their attribution models. During the Q&A session with iSpot EVP of Customer Success, Mark Myers, Lana recounted the steps Wayfair took to improve TV and video advertising with actionable tips for how to measure TV’s impact.

4 Video Advertising Improvements Wayfair Made

The video marketing space evolves quickly and Wayfair has kept pace, even beating the curve in some instances. Lana shared the following four major changes Wayfair made to its TV and video marketing strategy and measurement. 

1. Integrating Linear and Streaming Channels

As the landscape has evolved and the gray space between linear and digital has grown, Wayfair decided to combine their linear TV and online video channels to better enable platforms and measurement unification. From a strategy standpoint, Wayfair thinks about TV as both a brand channel and a direct response driver. When thinking about performance, they often gauge success based on direct response ROAS data.

2. Bring TV Advertising Fully In-House

Throughout her time at Wayfair, Lana says that the underlying philosophy has always been the same, which is “achieving strong ROI alongside brand awareness and preference over time.” However, the “how” has changed somewhat. For example, one of the most important changes Wayfair has made to their approach is bringing TV fully in-house versus relying on agencies. This new TV channel team is cleverly referred to as the “Waygency.” Essentially, Wayfair runs all of their campaigns internally now, from creative production to planning, buying, and optimization, and all the way through to measurement and attribution modeling. This enables Wayfair to have tight feedback loops and pivot quickly to take advantage of efficiencies or pull back when they see pockets of inefficiency.

3. Measure TV’s Short vs. Long-Term Impact

Wayfair also started looking at TV performance over longer periods of time versus immediate response. This is where iSpot comes in to help Wayfair in understanding the long-term impact of TV. By leveling the playing field between creatives that are more promotional vs. those that achieve their brand-building goals, Wayfair is able to accurately analyze the difference in impact.

4. Determining Incrementality of TV

Wayfair thinks about TV as their “megaphone” to reach a mass audience at scale with their top priority being brand-building messages. Wayfair is now a household name with 80%+ awareness, and they credit much of this to their strong investment in TV from the early days of their brand. The way that Wayfair justifies their investment is through strong measurement where they seek to truly isolate the incrementality of TV advertising vs. all of the other channels.

Proving TV’s True Value

How exactly is Wayfair able to prove the value of TV? Wayfair uses a number of proprietary models to do this – from looking at spike visits that occur within minutes of an ad airing, to a multi-touch attribution model that identifies individuals that are likely to have been TV-influenced.

Wayfair leverages iSpot Individual User Level Data (IULD) to build synthetic control groups and identify the lift in revenue associated with customers who saw their ads. They are then able to cut that by network and creative to drive granular decision making, as well. 

“What’s exciting about this data set is that it really empowers us to manage our linear TV channel decisioning more similarly to digital.” – Lana, Director of TV & Online Video Marketing at Wayfair

Along with proving the incrementality of TV, Wayfair also uses creative testing. They will regularly put multiple versions of an ad into the market to gauge direct response performance and identify best practices for future ads. In doing this, Wayfair aims to control as much as possible for network and daypart mix, as well as share of voice, and launch them simultaneously to ensure seasonality doesn’t drive differences in outcomes. They are then able to look at the lift we see from each version and determine a winner. Sometimes Wayfair takes additional steps to go deeper and understand the “why” via consumer insights post-testing. This differs some from other advertisers who rely more heavily on pre-testing ads before putting them out into the market. With this approach, Wayfair is able to expedite testing, feedback loops, and subsequent creative enhancement and innovation.

Setting Higher Standards

The key to reaching higher standards is “progress over perfection.” TV measurement is incredibly challenging and imperfect, especially as the linear and digital worlds intersect and previously well-understood metrics like reach and frequency become challenged by cross-screen behavior. Measurement is always evolving. If you’re like Wayfair, and want to build it in-house, starting with a vision and a minimum viable product is a great way to do it, and then continually identify the blind spots and improve on it over time.

Wherever you are on the TV ad measurement journey, iSpot is here to provide fast and accurate TV ad analytics that speed up feedback loops and provide deeper granularity in the data you’re working with. All of these factors will significantly improve the actionability of your analytics and the resulting ROAS.

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