TV advertising has done a 180 over the past few years, from age-and-gender-based targeting to advanced audience-based buying.
Audience targeting is perhaps the most significant change in TV ad buying structures, says Alison Levin, NBCUniversal’s president of advertising and partnerships, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. Levin was hired by NBCU in December, after spending nine years at Roku, where she oversaw ad sales and revenue.
Compared to demo-based buys, advanced audience targeting helps buyers ensure they actually serve ads to viewers who they’re interested in reaching, Levin says. Whereas with broad demos, buyers are bound to reach the same viewers over and over.
The shift to advanced audience buying is quickening, Levin says, especially for streaming ad buys. In total, more than 50% of NBCU’s upfront deals this year were transacted on advanced audiences.
Conversations about ad targeting center on advanced audiences, but measurement and attribution are the “missing pieces” in the TV advertising puzzle, Levin says. Attribution upgrades could help push more budgets from demo-based buys to advanced audiences.
Advanced audiences span from in-market audiences (such as consumers in market for a new car) to audiences with a propensity to buy a certain product based on someone’s online searches or purchase data.
Buyers are more open to advanced audience transactions precisely because it’s easier to attribute campaigns and optimize them accordingly. The alternative, Levin says, is waiting weeks for marketing mix modeling (MMM) reports to bear fruit.
MMM, Levin adds, is still a key component of media planning across the board to run smarter campaigns in the future. But MMM is still no way to optimize a campaign while its in flight.
Also in this episode: The similarities between ducks and programmatic ad buying, the differences between live and on-demand TV ad sales, and the evolution of TV ad buying teams.
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