The above video interview is from the ANA TV & Everything Video Forum.
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Brett Groom, VP Media, Digital & Social Marketing, sat down with me to talk about Online Video at the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) TV & Everything Video Forum in NYC.
ConAgra is changing its terminology to talk more about video rather than TV. While TV is still the medium through which most video about ConAgra’s brands takes place, ConAgra doesn’t really care where people see ConAgra brand videos, as long as the message gets through to the consumer in an impactful way.
One thing that has slowed ConAgra’s adoption of online video is the fact that to do online video successfully, a brand needs a wider range of content, both in terms of length of time and formats. To really take advantage of the targeting online video can offer, a brand ideally would create different versions of content for different demographics, which increases the content costs.
Like a lot of marketers, ConAgra is excited about the potential of addressable TV. Addressable TV allows marketers to deliver a car ad only to car owners or a cat food ad only to cat owners through set-top box technology provided by cable and satellite operators (Google is also getting into the game). The goal is to make TV ad targeting a bit more like online ad targeting.
Interestingly, Brett initially thought that addressable TV and online video were competitors, but he now sees one helping to drive the adoption of the other. For both, the imperative becomes to create a variety of content assets for different targeted audiences. Since that adds cost, the cost can now be shared across both mediums.
For a large brand like ConAgra, in a traditional TV plan at some point the brand maxes out on reach and is really just buying frequency. At a certain point, any incremental spend is increasing reach in a negligible amount, and mostly increasing frequency to the same consumers. The top quintile TV viewers tend to be low quintile online video viewers, whereas top quintile online video viewers tend to not watch very much TV.
ConAgra is starting to take some of its TV budget and move it online to simultaneously scale down the frequency it reaches its top quintile TV viewers while reaching new viewers online who may not watch much TV. For ConAgra, that is the real opportunity for online video.
While most consumer packaged goods companies are currently spending maybe 10% of their video budget online, Brett sees that number scaling to 50% in the next few years.
In terms of where ConAgra has spent online video dollars, the brand has run pre-roll ads against Hulu style content, produced rich media (video) side of site display ads, and produced videos for distribution on sites such as Youtube.
