As Facebook and Twitter duke it out to be the town square for people nattering about their favorite television shows, Twitter has had a big advantage on the advertising side: it offers an ad targeting option that can help brands hit the same viewer twice, once on TV and once on Twitter.
Facebook, which was slower to recognize the potential of social TV, offers nothing similar amid its plethora of ad formats and targeting capabilities.
But thanks to the efforts of a couple of outside companies, TV advertisers are about to get an option to hit Facebook users with a one-two punch: Brands will be able to buy ads that will reach people who are on the social network at the same time that their ads are running on local TV stations. BMW, for instance, could decide to show an ad to Facebook users online in Atlanta at the same time that the local ABC station was running a BMW ad on “Scandal.”
“An advertiser just decides which TV ads they want to use as triggers,” said Rob Leathern, founder and chief executive of Optimal, the San Francisco social advertising company that will announce the new targeting program on Wednesday. “We’re basically betting, and our advertisers are betting, that some portion of the audience is on Facebook.”
Optimal is working with a Dutch company, Civolution, whose computers watch TV channels worldwide in real-time and catalog everything running on them, including the ads. A few seconds after Civolution detects a TV ad on the air from a brand that wants to reach Facebook users, Optimal’s technology can serve an ad to the news feeds of people in that geographic area who are online with the Web version of Facebook.
Note that this is a shotgun approach compared with Twitter’s sniper-like targeting.
And Optimal, not Facebook, is offering this new product, and the smaller company doesn’t have access to Facebook’s data on who is actually talking about a show.
Twitter, in contrast, tracks ads on TV shows itself and can then show ads from the same brand to people posting on Twitter about the show in other words, people who almost certainly saw the original TV ads.
But Mr. Leathern says his company’s approach still delivers good results. In a pilot program with a media and entertainment company, he said, the advertiser saw a 60 percent increase in clicks from people who saw both the TV and Facebook ads, compared with a control group that just saw the Facebook ads. The advertiser, which Mr. Leathern refused to identify because of client confidentiality promises, also ran Facebook ads when rivals were advertising their products on TV and saw a 35 percent increase in clicks.
Facebook declined to comment on Optimal’s new TV offering. But it was impressed enough with Optimal’s system of using outside signals to trigger Facebook ads that it gave the company the grand prize this month in an advertising innovation competition. (Shortly after, Optimal was bought by Brand Networks, although it continues to operate separately.)
Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst at the research firm eMarketer, said that Optimal’s approach was still unproven, but that the concept holds promise. “The idea of being able to reach someone who is perhaps watching television but is not fully engaged with the TV is very appealing to advertisers,” she said.
Facebook is also sure to be watching how Optimal’s product and other TV ad offerings being tested by other firms on the social network fare with advertisers. If they do well, Facebook could swoop in and offer its own, highly targeted ads linked to TV conversation on its network.
“Facebook has a history of allowing its ad technology partners to lead the way in offering new ways to advertise on Facebook,” Ms. Williamson said.
If social TV advertising turns out to have staying power, there is another tantalizing possibility: another company could aspire to be the online water cooler for Internet users and advertisers interested in television.
Civolution said its global TV scanning data can be connected to any real-time ad bidding service for any digital platform. So if, say, Google or Yahoo or a foreign site wanted to build its own hub for conversation about TV, Civolution could easily provide the data to help time the ads.
“We offer this to the open market,” said Alex Terpstra, chief executive of Civolution.
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