Media agency Horizon is giving its advanced TV platform Pivot a facelift.
Horizon is building a custom planning tool using 4C Insights, the social and TV data analytics platform designed to go beyond age and gender demographic targeting.
Instead, 4C’s tool will integrate with Pivot to help Horizon marry behavioral, attitudinal and purchase data with viewership data.
“The goal is to look agnostically across the marketplace, regardless of where we’re purchasing inventory, and find the best media choices within linear television,” said Sam Rose, VP and director of video investment for Horizon Media.
Those choices could include TV networks, day parts and programs that deliver the highest concentration of audience against a client’s custom target.
Although 4C originated in social as an early Facebook and Twitter marketing partner, it expanded to TV in 2015 when it acquired the broadcast analytics platform Teletrax.
Teletrax monitors linear TV ads and identifies when and in what context an ad showed up on a particular channel.
“We’ve licensed a number of TV viewership data sets to show that an ad not only occurred in linear TV, but that taps into smart TV data on a second-by-second basis,” said Anupam Gupta, chief product officer for 4C Insights.
4C can stitch smart TV viewership data back to a brand’s first-party or CRM data and match it with other offline, purchase-based attributes, and enable audience planning and buying based on Nielsen data sets.
4C’s differentiator is its affinity graph, which aggregates audience insights on 2 billion or more social media users, 200 million offline purchase profiles and 7 million TV households.
That data set will help Horizon fill in the gaps in cross-screen TV audience planning, Rose said.
“We see the trend toward OTT viewership, and it is a bit of a walled garden in terms of the granularity of viewership information we’re getting there,” she said. “Once measurement catches up there, it’ll be a great place to leverage both data and media.”
Until then, Horizon’s TV team will augment tools from 4C’s and TV networks’ respective audience platforms to aid with pre-upfront planning.
The tool, to be used by HorizonAdvanced, the agency’s TV team, and most of Horizon’s video buyers, will also assist with scatter market buys throughout the year.
“We’re using the tool to inform our entire linear buying process, but then working with our partners at the TV networks or addressable vendors to layer on complementary executions,” Rose said. “We had been looking at advanced data sets in the TV space for quite some time because age and gender are obviously just a proxy. The marketplace has really been challenged to go beyond that and get more targeted.”
