Comcast is the latest addition to a growing list of TV ad inventory sellers sprucing up their audience targeting to win more advertiser budgets.
On Friday, Comcast-owned ad buying platform AudienceXpress announced upgrades to its targeting capabilities, which include more data for audience segmentation and new conquesting capabilities. These targeting products will be available across the AudienceXpress footprint of 60 million US households.
The goal for AudienceXpress is getting this solution on the market in time for this year’s upfront season, said Katy Loria, chief revenue officer of both AudienceXpress and Freewheel, the Comcast-owned supply-side platform. (FreeWheel split up its tech and media solutions teams last year and rebranded the latter under AudienceXpress.)
Plus, with the state of the US economy still a bit of a “question mark,” Loria said, this year especially, buyers will be looking for more effective and efficient ways to reach audiences as they plan spend commitments.
Know your audience
Comcast has access to viewership data from set-top boxes in roughly 15 million US households, which it uses to segment its audiences.
The company also licenses third-party data from identity provider Experian. Ahead of the upfronts, AudienceXpress is increasing the number of Experian audience segments in its platform from roughly 100 to 150, including new segments based on household net worth and personal interest hobbies.
This targeting upgrade also includes a new AudienceXpress app that advertisers can use to onboard their own data and create audience profiles with their choice of Comcast, Experian and/or first-party segments.
Advertisers can then run campaigns through AudienceXpress on specific genres or programs that rank highly among their target audiences. Buyers can also use these more detailed profiles to make changes to their campaigns in flight, Loria said, such as moving ad spots over to dayparts that index higher on households with a specific income bracket.
Friendly competition
These campaign-planning touch-ups also include another new addition for clients: the ability to target ads based on competitor campaigns running on Comcast screens, known as conquesting.
If a shoe brand reaches a particular audience on specific networks or dayparts over the course of one to three months, for example, a competing shoe brand could choose to either target or exclude those same audiences in its next campaign.
Both strategies might make sense depending on a brand’s goals. An advertiser can try to convert audiences considering a different brand, although those consumers may still stick to the brand they were already considering. Or an advertiser can try to get in front of fresh eyes by targeting an audience that hasn’t seen a competitor’s ads yet.
Either way, planning a campaign based on a competitor’s performance could bring in new audience reach.
In the nick of time
Agencies that are testing these new products seem satisfied with the results so far, Loria said.
Matterkind, an IPG-owned agency piloting these solutions, can help agencies address brands’ needs to target more engaged audience segments and optimize campaigns in flight based on specific business goals, according to Larene Mantel, Matterkind VP of addressable innovation.
And when audience targeting gets more granular, the measurement reporting comes back more detailed. In addition to better targeting, more precise measurement is at the top of buyers’ wish lists going into this upfront season. Mantel said these latest upgrades to are also giving Matterkind a better sense of deduplicated reach.
AudienceXpress expects its new products to improve targeting capabilities for existing clients in addition to drawing in new ones during the upfronts, such as TV advertisers spending elsewhere or marketers new to the TV ecosystem altogether.
Overall, Loria said, better audience targeting that has more parity with digital advertising likely “will bring more marketers into the TV space.”
