TONIK+ Video Intelligence (TVI): How TVI’s highly-resonant content can lift performance across verticals and platforms throughout the conversion funnel
Since our inception, TONIK+ has been developing a novel and effective way to remix content to improve performance and provide more bang for a client’s buck. Through the use of granular retention data, TONIK+ and the TONIK+ Video Intelligence (TVI) platform, we are able to identify the most-resonant portions of any piece of content, score them on an easy-to-understand scale, and automatically remix the original piece of content into specified lengths based on need and strategy. This methodology has resulted in a straightforward but powerful platform that allows us to better a client’s own content and greatly reduce the amount of ad spend needed to generate their necessary KPIs. One of our primary tenets is that better content improves every aspect of a social advertising strategy; not just video-based metrics, but metrics across the entire conversion funnel. We have repeatedly seen this tenet proven again and again in our work with a variety of clients and brands, and we wanted to take the opportunity to present our holistic results in a series of white papers.
Ultimately, the goal of content is to increase the resonance of the product, service, brand, or beyond. “Resonance” in this instance refers to the feeling of connection, interest, or usefulness that a user has with a brand’s offering. The higher the resonance, the higher the likelihood that the user will call upon the offering at some point, thereby increasing the effectiveness of the content that was deployed. Resonance is also ubiquitous for content since resonance is all-encompassing. Highly resonant content will see higher metrics across all levels of the funnel. That means in theory Awareness objectives will be boosted by resonance as well as Conversion objectives in a “rising tide lifts all boats” sort of way. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily play out in practice, due to bid algorithms and allocations prioritizing the KPI objective, sometimes to the detriment of others. However, this still affects KPIs across the path: an Awareness campaign that has higher resonance will see higher View Rates than its peers. The same goes for Video View campaigns and Clicks campaigns: while they all occupy different positions along the conversion pathway, they will all see higher rates and performance for higher resonance content.
Our previous white paper demonstrated the outperformance of TONIK+ remixes overall and across multiple common ad lengths, but ad length is only one factor that imparts itself on the multi-faced performance of any given piece of content. There is a multitude of factors that influence the amount of a specified dependent KPI variable; ad length is one, but there are other independent factors that we can use to slice our data and view how TONIK+ performs in the chosen specification. In this second white paper, we wanted to take an in-depth look into two factors: Ad Platform and Brand Vertical, specifically Entertainment versus Non-Entertainment. These two factors are quite different from one another: Platform choice is a dynamic decision that a strategist can make at the outset of every campaign, but Vertical is static and will not change for a brand barring a major change to the company itself. These factors also differ from the content length, since that factor is intrinsically tied to the content itself much more than either Platform or Vertical. If TVI succeeds at showing outperformance for all three of these factors, it speaks toward the idea of TONIK+ tapping into and improving the overall resonance of the content, rather than tailoring output to boost performance for a particular, narrow range of measurement. Basically, if TVI can do well across a bunch of inherently different factors, it speaks to both A) an underlying “resonance” factor to content that TONIK+ can analyze and maximize in subsequent content no matter the environment, and B) the effectiveness of TONIK+ content to elevate your brand’s content per dollar spent.
In order to show the effectiveness of TONIK+, our TVI platform, and our generated remixes, we’ve taken a look at the historical performance of our remixes against our client’s non-TONIK+ content within the campaigns we’ve worked on. We specifically focused on View-Through Rate (VTR), Video Completion Rate (VCR), and Clickthrough Rate (CTR) across two dimensions: Entertainment versus Non-Entertainment brands, and across five different platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube. Our results are nearly universal in favor of TONIK+ content, demonstrating the ubiquitous improvement in performance across a multitude of different specifications. When coupled with our previous white paper, TONIK+ and TVI have shown that they are up for improving content, no matter the length, vertical, or platform that they run on.
Overall
Similar to the previous paper, we took a look at overall performance of TONIK+ versus non-TONIK+ content across VTR, VCR, and CTR. However, the previous white paper only looked at a subset of our data, focusing on five specific content lengths (:06, :10, :15, :30, :60) and eschewing any atypical content lengths. Since we’re breaking down our data on two new dimensions for this paper, we went back and took a look at our full historical data, incorporating all content lengths into the results.
Table 1 shows the outperformance for TONIK+ content relative to non-TONIK+ content across View-Through Rate, Video Completion Rate, and Clickthrough Rate for the complete Overall dataset and for the 5 common content length Overall (5CCL) dataset from the previous paper. The Complete Overall breakdown does see lower performance for VTR and VCR relative to the 5CCL set, with VTR coming in at -6.08% and VCR coming in at 12.58% outperformance, respectively. As discussed in the previous paper, the negative performance of VTR for TONIK+ is most-likely related due to social platform allocation toward the primary KPI. Social platforms will sacrifice metrics earlier on in the funnel if it creates a higher KPI performance further down the line: if the campaign objective is Clicks, the allocation will distribute toward users that are more likely to click even if it means that they are less likely to watch. We’ll discuss this further in the Platform section later on. Video Completion Rate also sees a downturn but is still well above non-TONIK+ in performance. Part of this decline is due to TVI not having as much learning in atypical content lengths; TVI has much more learning toward the common content lengths than atypical lengths, as is, therefore, better-attuned toward maximization for these lengths versus the lengths that it sees on a less-regular cadence.
However, the largest change we see is in CTR. TONIK+ improves from 38.53% to 58.83% from 5CCL to Complete. Why the larger jump in outperformance when atypical content lengths are included? Most of this improvement is driven by Entertainment data, which will tend to run atypical length content closer to the release day of the film/show/etc. being advertised. Earlier content focuses heavily on Awareness, whereas the content released close to release focuses on ticketing, CTA, and other down-funnel metrics. This places a much larger percentage of atypical length content in down-funnel campaigns, thus leading to a large effect on CTR when atypical lengths are added to the set. This also demonstrates the resonance effect of TVI’s output: driving users toward action down-funnel is a huge determinant in getting users closer to your end goal, and TONIK+ is able to harness that into its content. Let’s continue this dive into performance by looking at Entertainment versus Non-Entertainment companies.
Vertical (Entertainment vs. Non-Entertainment)
One of the common questions we field from potential clients outside of the Entertainment industry boils down to “sure, this works for films and tv, but will TVI be effective for driving performance for my brand/service widget company?” Most of our case studies do focus on Entertainment, but that’s partially due to how visually translatable Entertainment content is to static imagery. A static image of Arnold Schwarzenegger piledriving a killer robot into an explosion leaves more of an impression in a case study than a shot of a customer testimonial. That doesn’t mean that non-Entertainment content is out of luck when it comes to TVI. In fact, we tend to see bigger initial improvements with our non-Entertainment clients than with Entertainment because the latter tend to have a deeper knowledge of what works visually due to the inherent nature of their work. However, assurances aren’t as secure as solid empirical data, so we took a dive into how our Entertainment data compares to the rest of our client data.
The results are presented in Table 2. For VTR, Non-Entertainment outperforms both TONIK+ Entertainment and non-TONIK+. This could be due to a higher percentage of non-Entertainment campaigns focusing on Awareness and early funnel objectives relative to Entertainment. With a higher tilt toward Awareness, we’re seeing a higher emphasis on VTR as a primary KPI, leading to better performance for this breakdown. VCR favors Entertainment, but Non-Entertainment still significantly outperforms non-TONIK+ by over 10%. Finally, we see a large difference in CTR between Entertainment and Non-Entertainment, but both still outperform non-TONIK+ content by a statistically significant margin. Similar to VTR, Entertainment tends to see both a higher percentage and magnitude of Click- and Conversion-based objective campaigns, leading to the 60% outperformance for the vertical. Non-Entertainment doesn’t see as much of an emphasis on Click- and Conversion-based objective campaigns, leading to “only” an 18% outperformance.
Based on these results, Entertainment sees a huge performance advantage when it comes to VCR and CTR. However, Non-Entertainment brands still see very favorable outperformance for VCR and CTR, and also see outperformance for VTR. Suffice to say that potential clients outside of the Entertainment vertical can rest assured with TONIK+ and TVI improving their content beyond their current performance levels.
Platform
Unlike Vertical, brands have a lot of control when it comes to where they’ll post their content for users to view. Platforms tend to get lumped in with one another, despite the fact that each platform has its own unique place in the market. Platforms like Instagram and Snapchat tend to lean toward strong visual content, while Twitter is very much an “in-the-moment” platform that can provide a hivemind Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque running commentary on popular events as they unfold. Facebook tends to see a high CTR relative to other platforms, while YouTube is very much entrenched in video-based content due to the default nature of a video-based site. Due to this variety, the content will see differences in performance across these various platforms even at similar levels of spend. A 20% VCR on Facebook could be equivalent to a 30% VCR on Instagram despite them sharing the same underlying ad platform. Because of this, comparing topline performance between platforms can be a difficult task, since KPI output will be relative only within each platform. However, driving content toward a higher resonance for the userbase should be universal across all these platforms. A 5% CTR might mean entirely different things on each platform, but a 15% outperformance will be the same on each platform. This led us to look at a platform-by-platform breakdown of TONIK+ outperformance over non-TONIK+ content; if TVI does tap into that underlying resonance aspect of content, we should see outperformance across all platforms despite their intrinsic differences.
Results by the platform are presented in Table 3. The first thing that jumps out is that outside of four results (FB VTR, IG CTR, SC VTR, TW CTR) all breakdowns significantly favor TONIK+ over non-TONIK+. Facebook VTR seems to be the sole underperformer in VTR, and could be the driver of the negative VTR performance in the Overall dataset. The other three results favor TONIK+ but have confidence intervals below 80%, making it difficult to separate these outperformances from the non-TONIK+ baseline. This makes sense for IG and TW CTR, as these two platforms tend to be the lowest in terms of driving Clicks, making performance separation difficult. Snapchat’s VTR is also affected by the platform itself: Snapchat leans heavily toward very short content lengths (:06-:10), making for a very small margin for differences in performance in terms of views. Surprisingly, we are seeing just enough significance for VCR outperformance on Snapchat despite these short content lengths. This speaks to the strong performance of TONIK+ content on the platform even with the short length handcuff.
Outside of these instances, TONIK+ is clearly the top performer no matter the KPI or platform. Some platforms see stronger TONIK+ performance relative to non-TONIK+, particularly YouTube across all KPIs and CTRs on Facebook and Snapchat. The massive outperformance of TVI video content on the sole video-based platform represented here speaks to the ability of TVI to analyze and remix your original content based on how it resonates with your userbase.
Across any factor or component breakdown, TONIK+ content shows clear outperformance versus the non-TONIK+ analogs. This outperformance persists across multiple factors that differ greatly in their structure, scope, and adjustability, demonstrating the near-ubiquity of TVI’s ability to drive higher KPIs. No matter what your brand, product, or strategy is, TVI can harness the highly-resonant aspects of your content and remix it to provide the best version of your message across vertical, platform, or length. We’ll continue to explore the data further in future white papers, but these two white papers clearly show how beneficial TVI can be for your ad strategy, especially in a time where every dollar counts.
