LAS VEGAS – Turns out you don’t have to be on Wall Street to run a futures market. It’s happening every day in the traditional linear television business, according to Turner’s EVP of Client Strategy & Ad Innovation.
“Unlike digital, we’re actually working in a futures market,” says Michael Strober by way of explaining Turner’s audience targeting process. “Everything we do has to be projected or estimated looking forward.”
During a break at CES 2017, Strober relates in an interview with Beet.TV how Turner has been providing advanced audience targeting for several years and has over a hundred different schedules to show for it.
“What we’re finding is that we can actually zero in on the audiences that our clients care about most in a linear fashion,” Strober says. “It doesn’t have to be addressable. We can do it in traditional linear television.”
Turner uses a proprietary algorithm and a model that provides audience estimates using historical indices. In addition, the company takes into account “a myriad of other variables” to identify desired audiences, according to Strober.
“The Algorithm goes through our inventory and will help isolate those particular shows limited to the half hour of each day of the week where a marketer’s audience would most likely be,” Strober explains.
The resulting schedule is trafficked in the same way as a traditional Nielsen demo-guaranteed schedule.
“When we get the findings afterward, we usually see a significant lift in the intended audience they care about most. On average it’s been about a 21 percent lift in that target,” says Strober.
Asked how Turner determines business outcomes resulting from a particular schedule, Strober says it requires fusing consumer behavioral data with viewership data.
“The fact that we can now apply data and analytics to linear television in ways that have never been done before I think is an enormous opportunity for both our clients and our agency partners to get on board,” Strober says.
This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
