Empire Today Measures TV Two Ways To Catch What News and Sports Networks Do For Sales

Many attribution models weigh the last ad before a purchase most heavily, so the search that closes the sale gets the bulk of the credit and the commercial the buyer saw weeks earlier gets far less than it earned. As marketing leaders come under pressure to defend the return on every dollar, that undercount matters more, since broad-reach media that looks weak on paper is the hardest spend to justify. Pull back on it, and the other channels cost more, because it was driving demand to them all along.

Stephanie Stawniczy is Marketing Director at Empire Today, the national flooring and home-improvement retailer known for the jingle that sings its phone number. She spent more than a decade on the agency side, starting as a direct-response television buyer at Horizon Media and later running media operations across North America, where she helped build integrated linear and digital campaigns for national brands. In her current role, she manages upper-funnel media, mainly linear TV and CTV.

"The moment you turn off the big networks, everything else gets more expensive. Search, brand, non-brand," says Stawniczy. Over her career, she has learned that no single measurement shows everything those networks do.

The fast and slow signals

The oldest way to measure a TV spot counts the people who search for the brand in the minutes right after it airs. That works for ads meant to get an immediate response. On the biggest networks it misses much of the impact, because people watching the news or a game often don't stop to search the second an ad plays.

"When one spot airs on CNN or Fox News, people aren't necessarily responding within those time frames. They're engaged in the news," says Stawniczy.

The response still happens, but it shows up later and further down the funnel, where the older method can't see it. Deterministic modeling covers that gap by matching exposures to IP addresses and following them toward a purchase, which gives high-reach networks credit for the demand they generate. A national news buy measured only by the quick search count seems to do very little. Measured both ways, the same buy can turn out to be one of the most productive lines in the budget.

Every day, Stawniczy checks which networks set off a burst of searches after each spot, while her agency tracks who goes on to buy. The two often disagree at first. A network can look like it's underperforming on sales while interest in the brand is climbing, and she reads that as a signal to wait, because she can already see the network doing its job.

Let it cook

Upper-funnel media takes time to work, and how long depends on what's being sold. "I always say, you've got to let it cook," Stawniczy notes. Someone shopping for flooring or a car usually takes weeks to decide, long after a short attribution window has closed. Until then, the demand a campaign created hasn't turned into sales, so its early numbers come in soft.

Her plans start from historical data and audience indexing, evidence that a given network reaches the right people, which gives her good reason to hold steady in the meantime. The numbers usually firm up within a couple of weeks as the campaign builds, and when they don't, she adjusts.

That first stretch also shows which placements deliver results and how they support one another. "If you don't take the time to gather those learnings, you're just being reactive," says Stawniczy.

Owning the upper funnel

Stawniczy talks with her finance team regularly about how upper-funnel spending affects everything below it, and Empire Today's already seen it work. The company used to concentrate on media closer to the sale because it was efficient, then shifted more budget to the upper funnel in a move it calls flipping the funnel. Its down-funnel costs dropped as a result.

An agency running a brand's ads often manages 10 to 20 other clients at once, so she thinks a brand that's putting a large share of its budget into the upper funnel needs its own expert in the room. She and her agency have tested new channels together, and the media plan is stronger for it.

She hopes more brands create that kind of role. "You need an advocate on your side who's going to help you push for those dollars and put them in the best place at the right time for your brand," she adds.

Any opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Empire Today, LLC, its owners, management, associates, subsidiaries and/or affiliates.