Glenfiddich, a family-owned maker of single-malt Scotch whisky, is among the first advertisers to place an addressable TV buy through DISH Network’s new programmatic marketplace, which launched in October.
Glenfiddich’s media planning and buying agency, Resolute Digital, is using Rocket Fuel’s demand-side platform to serve an addressable, 30-second TV spot to the brand’s target audience through the end of the year.
“As budgets have increased for programmatic TV, we’ve been doing more test buys like this one one for clients,” said Jarod Caporino, president of Resolute Digital. “We’re looking at various data segments DISH has to offer, the goal being to optimize the campaign in more real time and hitting the exact target we want with very little waste.”
Because of the complexities involved in marketing libations, addressable TV is particularly attractive because of its ability to narrow down to certain households (for instance, where there are no children residing) as well as optimize in more real time.
“TV is an important part of our media mix, but traditionally we’ve relied on ratings points to inform media-buying decisions,” added Harvey Purchase, SVP of US marketing for Glenfiddich’s parent brand, William Grant & Sons.
“We know a lot about who our customers are from a demographic and behavioral standpoint,” he noted, “but … even if we were reaching our core audience, we were also serving ads to a broader constituent that might not be as influenced by them.”
Working with Resolute Digital and Rocket Fuel, the brand is now able to target with household-level impressions.
Glenfiddich’s high-level target is whisky drinkers who tend to skew male, but that’s not to say it’s neglecting the female audience, Caporino said.
Generally, it’s targeting households with an income of more than $100,000, and because Glenfiddich is distilled by hand and family-owned, those who consume its whisky tend to prefer a personal touch.
Thus, the campaign creative features the story of Sandy, the great-grandson of Glenfiddich’s founder, who brought the whisky to the US in the 1960s.
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DISH’s audience platform offers about 80 data segments, which Resolute is incorporating into its buys using Rocket Fuel’s DSP.
Rocket Fuel’s acquisition of [x+1] gave the company more credo in first-, second- and third-party data matching, which will be critical for identity stitching in cross-screen campaigns and for audience extension in addressable TV buys, said Randy Wootton, Rocket Fuel’s CEO.
Although Resolute uses Rocket Fuel’s DSP, it’s just starting to explore usage of its data management platform.
DISH’s programmatic offering helps Glenfiddich identify more attributes around standard segments – for instance, a sports enthusiast segment might be broken down further into NASCAR, football or soccer fans.
Glenfiddich and Resolute are in the midst of a live campaign now, but are swapping out messaging on the fly for different segments – for instance, a sports viewer versus a news and entertainment viewer – to see what sticks using Rocket Fuel’s Moment Scoring feature.
“The campaign objective for Glenfiddich is to increase awareness while reducing advertising waste,” Caporino said. “To evaluate it’s success, we will back out a CPM, compare it to the level of targeting and use third-party measurement tools to determine if there was a lift in awareness.”
One tool is Rentrak, which Resolute uses as a baseline measurement between the brand’s target segments and TV impressions.
Because addressable TV is more expensive than a linear market buy, one determination for success is finding out whether there was an increase in site traffic or social media activity in certain geographies.
Since the campaign’s inception on Nov. 19, the ad has been served more than 200,000 times to individual households during primetime across a series of cable networks available on DISH.
DISH’s total addressable household footprint is about 8 million, a factor of which Resolute is well aware of in terms of reach limitations.
“Eight million is great, but when you start to compare that to the rest of the world in terms of TV audience, it’s small,” said Caporino. Addressable TV tends to distill the audience size down even further once segmentations are in place.
“We are cognizant of that moving forward,” said Caporino, “but [in general] sometimes [scale] is a trade-off for the level of targeting we get.”
