The combination of data and technology is bringing some of the best practices developed in digital programmatic advertising to the television-buying world. That same melding when applied to cross-platform targeting affords media planners the ability “to understand consumers wherever they are,” says Evan Hanlon of GroupM North America.
What they have in common is two trends, Hanlon, who is Managing Partner and Director of Strategy & Platforms, says in an interview with Beet.TV.
“One is that our technology and our data science to match people up across multiple devices is a lot stronger. The second piece is that there’s a lot more identifiable devices that can be built into this big match network,” Hanlon says.
It all started on the desktop, then spread to mobile devices and “now we’re at the point where we’re adding in smart TV’s, over-the-top devices and also, critically, we’re adding in the set-top box as well,” says Hanlon.
Calling the living room TV screen “incredibly valuable real estate and inventory,” Hanlon believes that the ability to deliver data to set-top boxes and other devices—along with dynamically inserted ads—means “we’re now starting to be able to take some of the best practices we developed in the programmatic space and apply them in the TV buying world.”
The value to brand marketers is twofold, the first being better control over reach and frequency of ad messages. The second is dynamic ad insertion and the ability to serve appropriate ads at key times.
“So now you can better understand where a user is in the consumer journey and understand where you need to serve them a branding message that really starts to encourage them to switch, or a conversion message that gets them into the store or online to a website to convert right away,” says Hanlon.
Paving the way for cross-screen activation has meant “solving the attribution piece” along the way, according to Hanlon. “Because we’ve started to network in these TV devices to the broader device graph, desktop and mobile as well, we have a better understanding of every single touch point now within a media plan tied back to a user,” says Hanlon.
Advanced attribution techniques afford the ability to judge the incremental value of every single ad impression, which when aggregated up help to inform things like media mix modeling and reach/frequency curve analysis. “But it also gets us really close to the newer wave of digital attribution techniques in a cross channel fashion,” says Hanlon.
This video explores the state of cross-screen addressable video advertising. The series is sponsored by AT&T AdWorks. Please visit this page to view more videos from the series.
