LAS VEGAS – Although the Dolan family sold Cablevision Systems last summer, they have continued to stay close to the industry and are building on their experience in the new venture they’ve named 605. Television programmers and cable operators will be among the first to benefit from 605 CEO Kristin Dolan’s longtime involvement with addressable linear TV and her passion for more precise audience targeting using data, she explained during a Beet.TV panel discussion held at the OMD Oasis at CES 2017.
Joining Dolan on the dais were Denise Colella from NBCUniversal, Turner’s Michael Strober, Jonathan Steuer from Omnicom Media Network and moderator Matt Spiegel of MediaLink.
Asked to trace the Dolan family’s pioneering involvement with addressable linear TV, she explained how for 27 years she helped run Cablevision—from its trucks to its call center—and oversaw the in-house marketing department. Cablevision started aggregating set-top box data with an initial sample size of 1% and around 2007 began dabbling with addressability. Located in the number one market, it would become the first 100% addressable U.S. cable system.
“We had lot of time and the benefit of some runway to really learn about addressability,” said Dolan. “Our sales teams used data from the set-top boxes to sell advertising on an impression basis. They could sell long-tail content because we could apply actual viewership information against those long-tail networks.”
Being a subscription-based business, Cablevision “utilized our own avails a lot” to target viewers to upsell services and for tune-in initiatives. “We could do frequency capping and media optimization within the marketplace, and integrate both the opportunity to have set-top box data and 100% addressability within our own company,” said Dolan.
After completing the sale of the company, the Dolans formed Dolan Family Ventures then acquired Analytics Media Group and formed 605, whose segmentation and targeting services started in political advertising and have expanded to serve companies like Walmart.
Given all of the “noise and the discussion about the marketplace right now” about marketers leveraging more precise audience data, Spiegel asked Dolan why 605 is starting out with a focus on the sell side.
She used the words “passion” and “passionate” to describe her affinity for using data to provide better audience targeting, noting that 40 million homes are reachable via addressable linear TV.
“Because our primary experience is coming from cable television and a lot of our relationships in the past have been with the programmers that’s the area we want to focus on first,” said Dolan.
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.
