TV advertisers are obsessed with outcomes – but before marketers can measure them, they need more information about their audiences.
On Wednesday, Nielsen added more than 200 advanced audience segments in Nielsen ONE, its cross-platform analytics dashboard. The segments come from Nielsen’s consumer insights arm, Scarborough, which is a local analytics database that helps media sellers and buyers better compare local, national and streaming TV campaigns.
(Scarborough Research started as a joint venture between Nielsen and Arbitron in 1987 before becoming part of Nielsen’s local insights hub in 2013.)
According to Nielsen, these insights will help advertisers plan campaigns that reach and resonate with their desired audiences, including on linear TV, where one-to-one targeting is hard to achieve.
“Regardless of whether a media channel is addressable or not, it’s still reaching strategic and high-value audiences,” said Ellie Pryor, VP of global audiences and identity at Nielsen. “So, understanding how these different media buys interact with each other [helps buyers] make better investment decisions.”
Scarborough audience segments are already available in Nielsen ONE for planning and measurement, but not yet for activation. Nielsen plans to make roughly 1,000 Scarborough-based segments available for activation in Q2, alongside planning and measurement.
In the meantime, Nielsen expects its Scarborough audience segments to help buyers expand their targeting – and, in turn, better measure business outcomes.
More data, please
Scarborough’s advanced audience segments are based on annual surveys conducted with more than 300,000 US adults.
The surveys collect demographic info, consumer preferences, purchase behavior, life stage and other data, which help create advanced audience segments across verticals, including food, beverage, travel, retail, automotive and politics. Think heavy social media users, frequent food delivery service users or regular seafood restaurant visitors, just to name a few.
Nielsen says these new audience segments are meant to enhance – not replace – a marketer’s first-party data strategy. Although first-party data alone is incredibly rich and valuable, there are natural limitations, Pryor said.
For example, first-party data can be pricey to obtain and manage or miss important context without enrichment. An airline, for example, can track ticket sales using first-party transaction or credit card data, but without additional insights, it wouldn’t know a ticketholder’s travel intentions, life stage or other context that could help with ad personalization.
Advanced audience segments can come in especially clutch for marketers who buy local and national inventory, manage multiple product lines and/or have insufficient first-party data of their own, said Michele Donati, EVP and chief of futures at The Futures Group, a strategic insights group within Horizon Media.
It’s still too soon for media buyers to speak about how they’re using Nielsen’s new segments, but Horizon Media already licenses the survey-based insights from Scarborough that feed those segments.
In practice, Nielsen’s new audience data could help bridge the gap between national and local TV media planning.
Automotive suppliers, for example, buy national TV commercials, but regional dealerships typically handle the local media buying. Adding more advanced consumer analytics into the measurement mix can help automotive marketers see which messaging resonates best in certain cities.
The same logic applies for, say, a grocery chain trying to expand its retail footprint in a new area. The chain “may not have a lot of first-party data yet,” Donati said, but Scarborough segments can help spotlight health-conscious consumers, high grocery spenders or other desirable groups.
Outcomes or it didn’t happen
Even so, advanced targeting is a means to an end. Outcomes are what marketers really care about.
As an industry, “we’re seeing a huge shift to outcomes,” Pryor said, referring to the growing focus on measuring TV ad performance. Reaching the right audience is the first step.
“What I hear from clients is that audiences are a proxy for outcomes,” she said. “The reason you care about an audience is because you believe it will have an outsize effect on driving a certain outcome for your business.”
Nielsen expects media buyers to measure reach and frequency alongside its new audience segments. That way, Pryor said, marketers can determine which types of households, demographics or advanced audience segments appear most receptive to their campaigns.
This approach speaks to the intensifying pressure that marketers and buyers face to justify every media dollar.
At Horizon Media, Donati said, “our analytics team does a lot of work to show the accountability of every media dollar we spend on behalf of our clients – and audience delivery is a component of diagnosing and contextualizing the results.”
For that reason, she added, Nielsen’s new advanced audience segments might help “get us closer to measuring media in a much more meaningful way for brands.”
