Having long said goodbye to digital and television media buys based purely on age/sex demographics, the more pertinent parameters are now passion and partnerships. So says the president of U.S. operations for Initiative, the media strategy and investment unit of Interpublic Group.
“I don’t think we’ve made a decision about linear TV buying or digital buying based on age/sex demographics in many years,” Kris Magel says in an interview with Beet.TV. “What’s really fascinating in the business these days is that there’s a wealth of data available now for us to go a lot deeper than we could in the past.”
This deep dive typically involves building proxies for the target audiences of Initiative’s clients with first- and third-party data and marrying it with information from set-top boxes and digital device usage. “As a result, we’re able to identify areas of passion and develop strategic partnerships with linear TV and digital companies,” Magel says.
To Initiative, if a client has a specific customer audience totaling anywhere from one to perhaps four million, addressable TV ads “can be very useful,” according to Magel. For clients with a much larger target audience, “Addressable can be useful but I think it’s better to go to market with a combination of addressable, which is pure and very measurable, and also a larger, scaled approach using high-composition audience buying,” Magel says.
Magel has inured himself to the claims and counter claims of digital and TV media sellers during the ongoing Upfront presentations—whether it’s the “death” of linear TV or the “dings” associated with the viewability of some video offerings. These days, it’s less about why a certain TV has been scheduled for 8 o’clock on a particular night than it is the new data products that sellers can bring to the table.
“At the end of the day, the truth of the matter is it’s one very large robust video marketplace and today more than ever it’s critical that our clients are taking a holistic approach to video,” Magel says. “If you are using just linear or just digital you’re missing a large portion of your audience.”
Beet.TV interviewed Magel as part of our series on addressable and the new world of television advertising. This series on Beet.TV is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks.
