Discovery’s Sam Garfield: The Full Force of TV Is Full-Funnel Attribution

Now more than ever, exploring new ways of compiling metrics as a way to best to approach television as a medium has become paramount. In a conversation with Beet.TV at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Horizon Media, Sam Garfield, vp of data strategy and advanced advertising planning at Discovery Communications, explains that this has created a shift in focus to full-funnel attribution.

“What that means is not just looking at the bottom of the funnel metrics, which we know are important,” says Garfield. “But also looking at the upper-level metrics, like brand awareness and brand health and how that plays into those bottom-funnel metrics.”

While forward-thinking analytics have helped provide insight into specific parts of how audiences have changed, Garfield notes that it’s also worth taking a step back and looking at TV from a larger perspective.

“We’ve kind of lost the full force of what TV can do in the conversation of outcome-based,” says Garfield. “So I think we have to bring it back to looking at what can TV do overall and part of that is brand health and brand awareness.”

Garfield points out that this is something that that digital behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have done particularly well as of recent.

“There’s a reason why those companies have increased their TV budget hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Garfield. “There’s a reason why the direct-to-consumer companies like Peloton are coming into TV, and the reason is because there still is no larger vehicle for mass reach, and so we have to make sure we’re painting the full picture when we look at attribution.”

In order to paint a full picture on their end, Garfield says that Discovery is expanding its partnerships, including one with 605, in order to widen their scale of metrics.

“You need that scale to look at the survey results and the outcome-based results together to get statistical significance,” says Garfield. “So we’re really excited we have a proof of concept in the works and we’re going to have the results in from that soon.”

Beet Retreat In The City @ Horizon Media is presented by 605 and Spectrum Reach. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

BY HILARY MILNES ON NOVEMBER 19, 2019