Addressable TV advertising shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for mass audience or network buys – or executed without rich data extensions, warned cable operators, agencies and media companies at the Advanced Advertising forum Thursday in New York.
Ultimately the promise of addressable TV depends on the granularity of audience-targeting data marketers get at the household level.
“Data-informed targeting works – it can help you sell more products, cars, or raise brand lift,” said Pierre Bouvard, SVP of research and analytics for TiVo. “But, there is no ‘perfect target.’”
Agencies and their clients often find the more attributes they target against, the more successful they are. Keith Kazerman, SVP of ad sales for DIRECTV, described an instance in which an auto company wanted to reach males 18-24 years old, with an income of at least $100,000 and were in-market to purchase a vehicle in the next five months.
The days of buying an age bracket as cheaply as possible are no longer, said Chris Monteferrante, VP of media sales at cross-platform ad network AT&T AdWorks. “We now have to bridge the gap between our current currencies and metrics” while augmenting newer tools.
TiVo’s Bouvard referenced a campaign that the DVR company worked on in conjunction with Comcast and agency Spark where a client “took a large chunk out of their network buy and put it into data-driven, addressable buys.”
Additionally, addressability helps advertisers get smarter about media output and spend. AT&T AdWorks’ Monteferrante noted a financial advertiser wanted to reach women of a certain age group who made $100,000 minimum per year and who lived in a household with children.
AT&T AdWorks looked at U-Verse triple-play households representing 15 million set-top boxes and, in this case, the attributes matched about 20% of its audience. “We looked at viewing data from those audiences in a way that’s privacy compliant and created a media schedule output that’s very specific – such as the highest concentration of viewers [can be found] Thursday nights on HGTV primetime and we’d book the schedule that way. We increased reach by 55%,” Monteferrante said.
But beyond increases in reach, Matt Bayer, VP of advanced TV at agency MAGNA GLOBAL, said addressing return on sales at the CFO level of an enterprise is also a core consideration.
While experts agreed traditional demographic information on age and sex are still valuable, agencies are winning key client accounts (like MediaVest and Honda) when they push beyond and use data to identify conquest sets or take a TV target and use digital to extend frequency and reach.
“Clients have been using third-party data for years [to enrich] direct mail or Web and display, but now TV is utilizing that data,” Kazerman said. And, although addressable buying is still in its early phases, Caroline Horner, SVP of product innovation at media measurement company Rentrak predicted that these buys will ultimately turn in to programmatic executions. “I think this will be the year you start to see that happen.”
