Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a television network based on age and gender attributes alone. “Most networks are going to look somewhat similar. Although the audience size may be different, they’re going to have similar audience comps,” says Ben Tatta.
Hence the gradual shift toward audience-based selling, which allows for much more granular attributes that benefit both programmers and advertisers, the Co-Founder & President of data and analytics provider 605 says in this interview with Beet.TV.
“It’s very difficult to distinguish one’s audience based on age and gender attributes alone,” says Tatta.
It’s only when viewership data are overlaid with things like viewer propensity for consumer packaged-goods purchases, car purchases, international travel or pet ownership do “the unique aspects of one’s network” start to come to the surface.
“What the opportunity is going forward is for programmers to be able to use census-based data, like what 605 has to offer, combined with attributes beyond just age and gender so they can represent their inventory in a much more granular basis and get maximum value out of it,” Tatta says.
On the back end of campaigns, data drives attribution measurement. While there are various ways of doing so, Tatta believes census-level data offers the most robust measurement because matching is done at the individual or household-to-household level.
“So rather than taking a small set of households and projecting out the total transactions that occurred based on a campaign, we can actually do it using individualized data,” he adds.
At 605, it’s all done in a privacy compliant way through a safe haven, according to Tatta.
605 recently announced a strategic data partnership with Charter Communications wherein the broadband communications company will provide 605 with aggregated and anonymized TV platform data from all of its cable system operations nationally without divulging viewers’ personally identifiable data.
“Obviously, with the most recent news, we could not be more delighted. We have a tremendous partner in Charter. We think there are going to be tremendous things we can do together.” Among them are “to add value by providing insights and analyses on that data.”
Tatta considers the present as an exciting time to be in the audience data business, particularly given the industry’s desire for total network and show ratings across devices. “So we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about that and we’re really excited to be working with the programming and advertising partners that we have.”
