LOS ANGELES – There’s something reassuring about knowing that a company called Target is very good at targeting its guests. In return, they inform the retailer about their television preferences along with “how they’re moving from one screen to another,” says Kristi Argyilan, SVP of Media, Guest Engagement & Measurement.
“Because we’re a retail organization, we’re able to really understand who our guests are and how they shop,” Argyilan says. “As a result of that, we’re able to create these rich marketing programs that are very specific to groups of human beings and what their natural interests are.”
The next step is taking that first-party data and applying it to mass media, television being “the frontier that we are going to attack in 2017,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
Knowing not on a demographic but more granular basis how Target customers view video has a direct impact on its program and content rankings “in ways that we didn’t necessarily expect.” Traditionally, marketers and media companies decided this while focusing primarily on high attentiveness and premium programming.
“But now we’re actually able to go right to our guests and ask them what do they consider their favorite programming, and those lists are very different,” Argyilan says. “So you can imagine the power of understanding that when we go to any of the media companies and talk about the kind of programming we want to buy from them or the kind of content we want to develop with them.”
Target hopes to get to a “more sophisticated place” with creative versioning, according to Argyilan. While it believes that addressable TV “has been stuck in this kind of awkward place for a very long time,” the retailer is hoping to find ways of doing addressable at scale for individual markets.
“We’re not to the place yet where we can start to understand patterns across the country that start to aggregate so it makes it easier for us to execute,” says Argyilan. “We’re still looking at it one store at a time, one market at a time, which just makes it hard from a mechanics standpoint to really be able to execute it at scale.”
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
