Now that the Super Bowl is over and the Winter Olympics are underway, the next big sporting event marketers have to look forward to is the NCAA’s March Madness tournament.
And at the risk of getting dorky with sports metaphors, DTC agency Rain the Growth already has a game plan to make sure its programmatic placements are a slam dunk.
Last year, the agency partnered with Spectrum Reach, Spectrum’s advertising arm, to analyze show-level metadata and see which programmatic CTV placements were performing best across several of its campaigns.
One of those campaigns was for a major food and beverage brand that wanted to build on the momentum of its Super Bowl advertising by securing spots in both men’s and women’s college basketball games during the tournament.
What began as a brand-building effort ended up delivering Rain’s highest response rate that quarter, according to Kyle Knutsen, the agency’s director of digital video.
“We were driving qualified visits relative to some of our most efficient buys,” said Knutsen, and at roughly 50% lower CPMs.
That’s no small feat, particularly for sports inventory, he added, which can get a bit “crazy” – as in price – due to heavy demand.
Show me the metadata
To help plan around that complexity, Spectrum Reach gets content metadata through its longstanding partnership with Nielsen’s Gracenote, which began as a way to keep its TV listings accurate and evolved into an ad sales offering a few years back.
Using Gracenote’s unique identifier, TMS ID (the name is a holdover from Gracenote’s previous owner Tribune Media Services, in case you were wondering), Spectrum Reach categorizes and tracks individual shows, genres and even episodes, making it easier to determine the exact placement of programmatic ads.
Although traditional linear TV has always been bought and measured at the show level, in CTV there’s still a lot of murkiness, said Alex Groysman, VP of advertising product development. You might buy a package from a sports publisher, but because there’s no industry standard for data granularity, it’s hard to know whether your ads are running during a live game, a recap show or in nonsports programming.
But because Spectrum works with all kinds of programmers and affiliates, including via its new app store, it’s incentivized to be more transparent, said Groysman.
Spectrum Reach can also tap into first-party data from Spectrum’s cable and internet customers, said CRO Dan Callahan, and then pinpoint known household identifiers tied to logged-in users, which are also passed along to its SSP and DSP partners.
Optimizing at both the audience and content levels helps produce better results, Callahan added.
‘It comes down to audience alignment’
In addition to enabling more precise and verified placements within March Madness games, Spectrum Reach’s data also allows Rain the Growth Agency to analyze and then optimize media buys to reach the audiences most likely to convert.
Based on Rain’s internal reporting, using show-level content signals is roughly four times more predictive than targeting specific app bundles and eight times more predictive than genre-based targeting.
Tapping into show-level signals also fits nicely into Rain’s existing CTV inventory strategy, Knutsen said, because the agency tends to buy against a lot of content from FAST channels, multichannel video distributors like Spectrum Reach and OEMs.
Per Knutsen, these types of publishers have a growing presence in Rain’s media plans – sometimes upward of 60% – mainly because they’re less costly than premium streaming services with AVOD options like Netflix and Hulu.
“Ultimately, it all comes down to audience alignment: If our audience is there, we’re going to air there,” he said. “We’re not forcing it when it doesn’t fit the model.”
Betting on the right bracket
Rain the Growth Agency has already applied many of the performance insights gained from its work with Spectrum Reach to ad buys across other distribution channels, including premium AVOD publishers.
And that tactic is fine by Spectrum Reach, by the way. According to Groysman, Spectrum wants to see greater adoption of show-level data in CTV advertising overall, because that will drive more accountability and transparency across the broader industry.
“We’ve had dozens of these ‘wow’ moments where advertisers come in with a certain preset notion about what drives performance,” said Groysman. “And oftentimes the data brings them new learnings and new opportunities to further optimize their investments.”
For example, Groysman said, during early conversations with Rain, the agency’s media strategists predicted that a certain campaign would perform well against premium news content as opposed to reality TV shows. Instead, reality TV turned out to be one of the campaign’s top performers.
Knutsen, meanwhile, said he was surprised at the “sheer volume” of impressions from women and younger viewers during March Madness games, audiences that advertisers mistakenly often don’t associate with live sports.
Now that Rain has a clearer picture of who’s tuning in, capitalizing on those insights is “definitely going to be a consideration for a number of clients,” said Knutsen.
