You might know it as Sky AdSmart, which is what most people still call it, but these days its proper name is AdSmart from Sky. Whatever you call it, it’s the thing that made TV advertising possible for a lot of smaller businesses, because it lets you show your advert only to the households you want to reach. How it does that is the place to start, because the way it works explains both what it’s good at and where its limits are.
How it works
With ordinary TV advertising, everybody watching a channel in the same region sees the same adverts. AdSmart breaks that link, so two families on the same street can be watching the same programme, and when the break comes one of them sees your advert and the other sees somebody else’s.
Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV, explains that the adverts are downloaded to each household’s set-top box ahead of time. When a break comes round in a home that matches the audience you’ve chosen, the box plays your advert in place of the one going out to everybody else, and then hands back to the programme. Nothing on screen marks it out as different, so as far as the viewer is concerned yours is simply the next advert in the break.
Because it all depends on the box, AdSmart works through Sky and Virgin Media, so it reaches homes that have one of those services, and a home that only has Freeview won’t see an AdSmart campaign. It runs on Sky’s own channels and on many of the other channels whose airtime Sky sells. ITV’s channels aren’t among them at the moment, although that could change if Sky’s agreed purchase of ITV’s television business goes through.
Who you can target
Sky builds its audiences from what it knows about its own customers, together with information from consumer data companies such as Experian. That gives you a long list of ways to choose who sees your advert, including:
- Where they live, down to the postcode areas you serve
- The kind of household, such as families with children
- Age group
- The type of home they live in, and whether they own it
You can combine them too, so a furniture retailer could choose homeowners within a certain distance of its showroom, and a college could choose families with teenagers across the towns it recruits from. We’ve written more about choosing areas in local TV advertising by postcode.
There are two things to understand about that list. The first is that you’re choosing households and not individual people, so everybody in the home sees the same advert, and you’re never told who any of them are. You describe the kind of household you’re after, and the matching is done at Sky’s end.
The second is that deciding how tightly to target is a judgement, and tighter isn’t always better. Every condition you add makes the audience smaller, and takes out households that might have become customers in time. For most local businesses the area does most of the work, and one further choice on top of it, such as homeowners, is often all that’s needed.
What that looks like for a local business
Suppose you run a garden centre a few miles outside Shrewsbury, and your loyalty scheme tells you that nearly all of your customers live within about half an hour’s drive. The ITV region you sit in covers several counties and a couple of big cities, so a regional campaign would have you paying to reach a great many people who are never going to make the trip. With AdSmart, you could choose the postcode areas that fall inside that half-hour drive, ask for homeowners, and leave it there. Your advert would then appear in those homes, on the same channels and in the same breaks that the national brands are using, while a household at the far end of the region, watching the very same programme, would be shown something else.
If you had a second garden centre in another town, each could have its own version of the advert, with the right address and the right offer on the end, which is something we plan for while the advert is being made.
What it costs
You pay for the households that are shown your advert. The price for each one is higher than it would be on ordinary TV, because you’re paying for the precision, but you’re buying far fewer of them and none are wasted on people who’d never become customers. That’s how a campaign can cost a fraction of what a whole region would. Our media buying partners can give you the current minimum spend and real figures for your own area.
The way a showing is counted works in your favour as well. A household is only counted once it has watched most of the advert at normal speed, so if somebody records a programme and fast-forwards through the break, that showing isn’t charged for. A campaign can also be given a limit on how many times each household sees the advert, which spreads the budget across the whole of your chosen audience and stops it being used up on the homes that happen to watch the most television.
What to expect once it’s running
An AdSmart campaign is bought as an audience and not as a place in particular programmes. With a regional campaign, the plan lists the channels, the programmes and the times, whereas an AdSmart advert follows your chosen households to whichever of the channels they happen to be watching. That can catch people out the first time, because you may never see your own advert at home, either because you live outside the area you’ve picked or because your own household doesn’t match the audience.
The response arrives differently too, as a gradual rise in enquiries over the weeks of the campaign and not as a jump in website visits a few minutes after a showing, because each household sees the advert whenever it happens to be watching. When the campaign has finished, your media buyer can tell you how many households were shown the advert, and from there it’s a matter of looking at your own enquiries and sales, with the places you left out as a ready comparison.
When it’s the right choice, and when it isn’t
AdSmart suits businesses with a clear catchment area or a particular kind of customer, such as showrooms, dental practices, colleges, estate agents and local attractions. It’s also a sensible way to try TV for the first time without committing to a whole region, and if keeping the outlay down is your main concern, we’ve written about the cheapest ways to advertise on TV.
It’s less suited to a business that wants as many people as possible across a region to know its name, because AdSmart only reaches the homes with Sky or Virgin Media and you pay more for each household. If that’s you, ordinary regional airtime on ITV will usually reach more people for the money. Plenty of campaigns use a bit of both, and working out the right balance between them is exactly the kind of question a media buyer is there to answer.
Your advert still has to be made properly
An AdSmart advert appears in the same breaks as the big national brands, so it needs to look and sound as though it belongs there. The viewer has no way of knowing that the advert before yours was bought for the whole country and yours for a handful of postcodes, so they’ll judge the two by the same standard. That doesn’t mean it has to be a big production, only a well-made one, built on an idea that suits the budget. It also has to be approved by Clearcast, like any other TV advert.
We make the advert and look after the clearance and delivery, and the airtime is planned and bought through our media buying partners. If you think AdSmart might suit your business, ask us for a free storyboard and we’ll show you what your advert could look like.