TONIK+ Video Intelligence (TVI): How TVI’s highly-resonant content can lift performance across various ad lengths throughout the conversion funnel

TONIK+
8 min readMar 30, 2020

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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.

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 five different content lengths: :06, :10, :15, :30, and :60. Our results show that not only does TONIK+ outperform non-TONIK+ across all three KPIs, it reveals optimal content lengths where the benefit of TONIK+ remixes creates a massive improvement in performance well beyond our previous expectations.

View-Through Rate

The performance of VTR for a campaign, while useful in terms of measuring campaign effectiveness, is also the metric that is the least reliant on content out of the three we’ve looked at. This is due to two major factors outside of the content’s control: Views are overly-reliant on the first two-to-three seconds of content, and the spend allocation algorithms of social platforms will sacrifice upper funnel metric efficiency for a lower-funnel KPI. For example, a Clicks campaign will allocate spend to maximize Clicks, even if it comes at the cost of losing Views. Because of this, overall VTR performance won’t be a true indicator of how well content drives VTR. With this in mind, we took a look at TONIK+ outperformance in terms of driving VTR across :06, :10, :15, :30, and :60 spots as well as overall.

Content Length

Table 1. VTR outperformance by TONIK+ content for all objectives and for Awareness-only campaigns. Italicized columns are confidence intervals for TONIK+ outperformance.

As shown in Table 1, TONIK+ content underperforms in terms of VTR rate when all types of campaigns are included. As explained earlier, social platforms will sacrifice metrics earlier on in the funnel if it creates a higher KPI performance further down the line. If the algorithm has to choose between a Conversion campaign that drives a 30% VTR and a 1% Conversion Rate and a campaign that drives a 20% VTR and a 4% Conversion Rate, it will prioritize the latter 99 times out of 100. Because TONIK+ historical data runs across a multitude of objective types at all parts of the conversion funnel, a simple all-objective summarization of performance leads to a lower outcome than would be expected. However, when we look at Awareness-only campaigns, TONIK+ content significantly outperforms across these common content lengths. Overall, Awareness campaigns see an 18.25% outperformance by TONIK+ content, with :06 and :60 spots driving the highest outperformances of 32.41% and 24.67%, respectively.

When focusing on Awareness, TONIK+ remixes are able to drive a higher volume of users to view content at a similar level of impressions, giving TONIK+ the edge when it comes to getting eyes on your content.

Video Completion Rate

Video Completion Rate is quite possibly the “purest” indicator of content quality, as it informs us as to how many people who started watching the content ended up watching it all the way through. Quality creative content will naturally see a higher percentage of completions, as users will be more engaged and invested in the content and will want to follow it to its completion. There’s no magic formula for content, and each brand will need to find its own voice and recognize how that voice needs to change and adapt over time. The most-successful brands understand this, which is why companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Apple see their slogans, visuals, and messaging evolve over time to keep content fresh and users engaged. Your VCRs and their change over time is the closest quantitative KPI metric you have to understanding how your userbase is resonating with your content strategy, and is a strong indicator of how your current content is faring over time and against past iterations.

How does TONIK+ fare in terms of outperformance for VCR? As seen in Table 2, TONIK+ outperforms non-TONIK+ by 22% overall, with all but one content length showing outperformance. Similar to VTR, we’re not seeing an appreciable pattern as far as content length goes, indicating that the material within content itself is a much larger driver of performance than its length.

Content Length

Table 2. VCR outperformance by TONIK+ content for all objectives. Italicized columns are confidence intervals for TONIK+ outperformance.

Interestingly, the only content length that doesn’t show statistical significance is the :10 spot length, which also happens to be the only length that shows TONIK+ underperformance. This indicates that TONIK+ and non-TONIK+ :10 spots are indistinguishable in terms of driving VCR. This makes practical sense: completion rates for short spots will be quite magnitudes higher than for :30 or :60 spots due to the relatively low time cost it takes for completion, making it very difficult to separate out performance for shorter spots versus longer spots. However, that doesn’t explain why TONIK+ not only outperforms by 24.4% in :06 spots, but also its >99.9% confidence interval in said outperformance. It could boil down to a couple of campaigns skewing results for the :10 length, leading to this aberration relative to the other findings.

That being said, TONIK+ content shows a nearly-universal ability to drive a higher percentage of users all the way through your content. The TONIK+ remixes that we generate through TVI are able to effectively grasp and maintain a user’s attention all the way through the content, no matter the length. The best part is that TONIK+ isn’t adding any new footage to the content itself: it just takes your content and distills it down to the best of the best for whatever length specified. The messaging is you, the construction is TONIK+.

Clickthrough Rate

The effectiveness of TONIK+ remixes on downward funnel metrics is possibly the most-frequent question that we field on a regular basis. Most strategists understand that better content will lead to better viewing metrics such as VTR and VCR. After all, content-based metrics are going to be heavily swayed by the content. But what happens when the desired outcome is not content-based? A high VCR is great and all, but what does it have to do with driving purchases?

Let me digress momentarily with a personal example. My favorite commercial of all time is the original Terry Tate: Office Linebacker spot that ran during Super Bowl XXXVII back in 2003. In fact, I still have a Terry Tate shirsey in a drawer somewhere that I received when I bought a pair of Reeboks shortly after that commercial aired. I can’t tell you what those Reeboks looked like, or how they felt, or even if I bought any more pairs of Reeboks after that purchase, but I can still recite a dangerously high percentage of dialogue from that commercial. Terry Tate: Office Linebacker was an extremely resonant piece of content for my younger self, so much so that not only has it stuck with me to this very day, it also drove me to go out and purchase a pair of shoes from a brand that I did not consider beforehand, nor considered since. Resonance is best reflected in video-based performance metrics, but it will also be reflected in metrics further down the funnel. Engaging content provides that push needed to get users to move toward converting.

Because of this, we’d expect to see higher CTR performance for more-resonant content, which would result in TONIK+ outperformance for CTR based on our VTR and VCR findings. These results are presented in Table 3.

Content Length

Table 3. CTR outperformance by TONIK+ content for all objectives. Italicized columns are confidence intervals for TONIK+ outperformance.

Unsurprisingly, the findings for CTR echo the findings for VTR and VCR. However, the magnitude of outperformance is even greater than the video-based metrics, with TONIK+ content delivering a 38.5% higher CTR overall than non-TONIK+. Once again, there is a single length that shows underperformance for TONIK+, and similar to before, the confidence interval indicates insignificance and suggests aberrations in the data. Unlike the previous two metrics, there seems to be a rough pattern based on content length, with longer spots driving higher CTR outperformance than shorter spots. In fact, the :30 and :60 length spots see a staggering 53% and 87% outperformance, respectively, over non-TONIK+ content.

Contrary to popular belief, higher-resonance content seems to have a massive positive effect on downstream metrics and can be a key part of strategies that are looking to maximize clicks or beyond.

As the results above show, TONIK+ remixes are very effective at driving KPIs across the board and over a variety of spot lengths. The ubiquity of TONIK+’s outperformance speaks to the effectiveness of both our platform and methodology and its persistence across metrics and lengths. Of course, content length is only one of many aspects that can be altered by strategists when preparing their strategies, and it may not be the primary focus of a brand as they put together their campaign allocations. In our next paper, we’ll dive into performance across different social platforms as well as performance across different verticals.

Bryan Williams, VP of Data Science at TONIK+

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TONIK+

TONIK+ is a video intelligence and editing solution that utilizes Machine Learning & performance data to maximize the impact of targeted video campaigns.