TelevisaUnivision is the latest TV publisher to join the self-serve trend that’s rising in popularity across connected TV advertising.
On Wednesday, TelevisaUnivision announced its streaming inventory is now available to buy through the ad planning and activation company fullthrottle.ai’s self-serve platform. The collaboration includes an ad bidder designed to improve both targeting and measurement.
For TelevisaUnivision, the first phase of the duo’s objective is making it easier for “high-value advertisers to gain access to and bid on” streaming ad opportunities that should resonate with US Hispanic audiences, said Brian Lin, SVP of product management and advertising at TelevisaUnivision. The second phase is to bolster ad targeting and, in turn, “drive better performance.”
Streaming is a performance channel, Lin said, and one of the main ingredients in the performance TV formula is data quality.
Performance reigns supreme
More connected TV publishers are adopting self-serve buying options to address the need for streaming supply to be easy to buy and data-driven.
Generally speaking, “there’s been an over-emphasis on performance marketing the last few years, [which] can often be a race to the bottom,” said Amol Waishampayan, fullthrottle’s co-founder. In the context of streaming, he said, agencies must ensure that “premium media investments are defensible to advertisers” with proof of performance on par with digital ad channels like search and social.
This is why, lately, we’re seeing a lot of traction and growth in the market for self-serve buying among small and midsize businesses, including mid-market indie agencies, Waishampayan said. Self-serve ad platforms also simplify targeting and measurement by consolidating campaign workflows within a single platform.
For TelevisaUnivision, collaborating with fullthrottle should also improve targeting accuracy and, in turn, business outcomes. Fullthrottle takes a brand’s or buyer’s first-party data and, using data clean room technology, matches that data with TelevisaUnivision’s household graph, which includes device IDs and hashed emails. Then, through a direct bidder integration with TelevisaUnivision, fullthrottle targets campaigns to households at the ZIP code level.
Fullthrottle can also take this matched audience data and create behavioral profiles of new households that are also likely to be strong customer prospects. The company says it has a 90% match rate accuracy using first-party data. On top of that, fullthrottle boasts an attribution product that connects purchase data with streaming campaigns to help brands determine if sales happened as a result of their campaign.
Paired with self-serve buying, TelevisaUnivision expects higher data quality and improved attribution should help buyers optimize their campaigns and achieve what they apparently care most about: performance.
Drako Media Group, a Montreal-based media agency, is one buyer that expects this self-serve offering to improve campaign results with Hispanic audiences.
Previously, the agency was mostly buying linear and programmatic activations separately, because those buying structures are still often siloed, said John Mark Rankins, media strategist and advisor at the agency. Siloes produce “reach and frequency analysis [that’s] probabilistic at best,” throwing a wrench into tracking conversions, he said.
But having targeting and activation available within one self-serve ad platform makes it possible for agencies to plan “thoughtful and considerate buys” that can achieve a brand’s reach and frequency expectations without over-serving and annoying certain viewers, Rankins said. Better reach and frequency management should also “remove inefficiencies,” such as overspending, he added.
Ultimately, TelevisaUnivision hopes its efforts to bolster ad buying, targeting and performance will attract more marketers trying to resonate with Hispanic audiences – including marketers who may not have invested in reaching these audiences before.
“Our hope,” Lin said, “is that we’re able to drive the conversation back to how impactful the US Hispanic community is to marketers.”
