But a new generation of technology, a new wave of direct-to-consumer brands and a strategic re-awakening at ad agencies are changing that story.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Natalie Wollet, president of The Cross Agency (TCA), a Cross MediaWorks company that is focused on using new-style TV as a direct response channel, explains how she is fusing digital chops with the TV box…

Scale: “We’re talking 119 million homes, 240 million viewers.”

Attribution: “What can be different for advertisers are digitally native is that they’re not used to the non-linear consumer path. So we work with our TV partners such as TVSquared, to give them the attribution and the control and the clarity that they’re looking for … similar to how they are in their digital executions.”

Pricing: “Our agency works with everything from cost per install to cost per visitor, cost per new user, cost per member… all the way down, funnel metrics, to cost per orders and costs per revenue. We’re no longer looking at … the traditional brand metrics where it’s spot-ran, cost per thousand achieved or eyeballs achieved.”

Creative versioning: “You have to have multiple (ad) creatives. We have no less than two, ideally three or four. You want to make sure you’re testing different creative unit lengths… different CTAs. You want to make sure you’re testing a mix of different formats. I’ve seen the difference in creative performance of up to 35%.”

Wollet explains: “Once we move out of planning, we move into execution. We are working every single day getting pre-logs and then day following post logs, uploading those into TVSquared and reporting back on KPIs.

“We do daily and weekly calls with clients; daily when we launch, weekly once the campaign is fairly calibrated and moving. Lots of hand holding but it needs to be when you’re working with such aggressive metrics like this.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.