Is Adsmart from Sky the key to your new customer growth? 

New customer acquisition is the only way to for brands to consistently improve annual revenue. It is not enough to simply try and sell more to the same people more frequently. You need to be seeking new customers on a regular basis and exposing your brand to newer and larger audiences. 

Now, that is easier said than done. And we’ve spoken a lot about what you can do in the digital space to help acquire new customers such as 

-       Using Youtube for upper funnel activity 

-       Embracing storytelling as a means to foster new customer relationships 

-       Making use of machine learning to help find new audiences

But what do you do when you have all of these strategies working at maximum capacity. Well, then its time to look at broader channels and the next logical step for most brands would be looking into TV. TV is still the most consumed form of content across audiences aged 16+. It has the highest engagement rate and lots of other psychological aspects that work in advertisers favour; such as Costly Signaling. 

But not every brand has the budget or the media planning capability to run TV ads so Sky built a digital solution. 

What is Adsmart from Sky?

Adsmart is Sky’s digital ad offering. The planning, targeting and execution works in a very similar way to other digital platforms like Meta and Google Ads but the integration within Sky channels makes the ads appear like the native TV ads you’re used to seeing everyday. 

Adsmart give brands the opportunity to access Sky and Virgin homes across the UK and has a wealth of unique targeting options. An extra bonus is you only pay when the ad has been seen, much like you would with selected Youtube formats served through Google ads. 

Gateway into TV advertising 

TV advertising is one of the most trusted forms of advertising. It’s trusted by both advertisers and consumers alike. If you're struggling to acquire new customers at scale, a form of TV advertising can act as a silver bullet to expose your brand, brand story and products to a very large audience.

Adsmart is the gateway into TV advertising. It gives you the same benefits but with the set up of a digital campaign. And here are some of those benefits. 

Brand recall

 Studies have proven that TV improves recall even when the ad creative is exactly the same.

So if you are already serving storytelling creative across your social channels, you may want to test them across Adsmart in order to see the benefits of brand recall. Remember the way to measure recall might not be straightforward. Outside of digital's brand lift tests, you may have to assume recall based on increase in direct traffic or increase in branded search volume. 

Costly signaling 

Costly signaling is the perceived notion that if a brand is advertising on TV, they must be a very successful and trustworthy brand. 

TV advertising is seen to be an expensive investment by consumers, therefore brands who are able to be seen on TV are seen to have a larger marketing budget, higher turnover and a stronger product offering. Consumers in turn will trust the brand more.

For smaller D2C brands, Costly Signaling can be a real asset as they will be seen as a bigger player than they currently are and will be able to build trust and reputation more quickly. 

Sometimes the advertising placement is as important and the message itself. 

Second screening

TV has the unique advantage of second screening. Second screening is where a consumer is engaged with 2 devices at once. We often see TV viewing coupled with mobile phone or laptop use. 

You might think that this would split focus over 2 devices therefore attention can only be on one. But this is not the case, we are able to split out auditory and visual attention so a consumer may be looking at their phone but can still hear a TV ad. And auditory attention still builds brand recall. Just think of campaigns like GoCompare or even the Phil Collins track Cadbury used. 

There is also the added benefit of consumers being able to immediately search for a brand or product on their second device. Imagine, a consumer sees your ad on their TV whilst holding their phone. They are mildly interested and go to immediately google your brand name to learn more. These searches could then be picked up in retargeting layers across your wider performance marketing. 

Value for money

TV isn’t actually as expensive as you think it is, you just have to buy in bulk. With a CPM of £8 for a 30 second ad placement, it’s the cheapest in comparison to Youtube and all other online video platforms. The snag is you can’t just spend £8.

Adsmart offers a more reasonable entry point with campaigns that can start for as little at £3k in media spend. 

Targeting Options

Rather than buying particular placements like traditional TV advertising, Adsmart’s targeting options are more akin to those of a digital campaign. Location, demographic and interest based targeting are all options plus some more unique options including: 

-       Experian mosaic – Adsmarts most sophisticated targeting option featuring numerous different household types based on a wide database of information on UK households.

-       Recent category purchases

-       Financial/Socio-economic data

-       Business owners/decision makers

-       Technology adoption

3 signs it might be time to start investing in Adsmart. 

-       You’re a brand who needs to scale fast 

-       You’ve run out of efficiency with your online campaigns

-       You have a clever new product which needs time and visuals to explain