Adap.tv, acquired by AOL six months ago, unveiled on Monday a new add-on to its Audience Path demand-side platform (DSP), called Audience Path for TV, to let advertisers and agencies apply more data to their linear TV ad buys.
The release capitalizes on a trend in which data-driven ad buying on linear TV presents opportunities for ad tech companies to push TV advertisers into adopting programmatic strategies.
Here’s how Audience Path for TV works, according to Dan Ackerman, Adap.tv’s SVP of programmatic TV: A buyer sets the parameters for the desired audience, the platform analyzes data from Nielsen’s audience measurements with Rentrak’s set-top-box viewing data and consumer purchase behavior to help advertisers further optimize their ad spend.
“The goal for us is to help agencies activate data in a programmatic way without using spreadsheets and manual processes,” Ackerman said. “What you get is a list of networks, days and dayparts, impression levels, GRPs and impressions against your targets, giving you full visibility into what the campaign would look like.”
MAGNA GLOBAL, the investment and intelligence arm of IPG Mediabrands, has been running digital and TV campaigns through Audience Path and MAGNA’s data stack, AMP.
Michael Brunick, SVP of programmatic at MAGNA GLOBAL, noted that Audience Path for TV represents “an evolution of what we can do with AMP data by helping us get as much use from it as we can.”
One of the tool’s benefits is that it allows the agency to find niche TV audiences that were previously unnoticed. “It’s hard to justify purchasing advertising from cable networks that go unrated by Nielsen since you can’t prove that people are watching it,” he said. “But with the advent of set-top-box data, we now have an extension to audiences that would have been overlooked, letting us maximize our clients’ investments.”
Adap.tv’s move to add programmatic capabilities to linear TV buying also speaks to a growing trend, according to Brunick. “With the application of more data sets and being able to further segment your audiences,” he noted, “Television is starting to act more like digital.”
