SAN FRANCISCO – As the advertising industry inches its way to more addressable linear TV, the OpenAP audience targeting consortium is looking to add more datasets to its platform. “There’s still a lot that we’re looking to be able to bring into it,” says Nicole Ruby, VP, Advertising Data Solutions, Fox Networks Group.
Within OpenAP, Nielsen and comScore are “locked in,” Ruby says in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “We’ve got their MRI fusion datasets, Catalina datasets, the MBI datasets all coming through. With comScore, we’ve got all of their syndicated datasets. So we feel like we’ve kind of got the right breadth of what is an industry standard could be within OpenAP today.”
What gets “really exciting,” according to Ruby, is being able to move beyond the traditional measurement providers. Options include set-top VOD data, “into more of the MVPD data that we can actually be leveraging, more specifically the IP connected data” along with data from smart TV’s.
“Really what it comes down to is we want to enable as many of these datasets as we can so that we can bring them all to an open playing field and then let brands and agencies determine where they’re going to see the most value,” Ruby says.
And then there is the promise of linear addressable, a key piece of the cross-platform puzzle. “We’ve managed to be able to really corner it with Hulu, we’re looking at Comcast set-top box VOD and really making inroads there. But more importantly, we’re starting to think about what we can do in the live, linear space and how we can actually start looking at ad versioning and addressable copy splitting in live linear.”
IP-delivered streaming content poses the potential for one-to-one relationships between brands and viewers. But it gets pretty complex with broadcast TV and in a primetime broadcast environment, according to Ruby.
“And I don’t think that’s a future that we’re going to see immediately, but it is one that we’re starting to really understand how the technology comes together.”
Audience targeting tends to be “bespoke” on a vertical-by-vertical category basis, with automotive in particular having a longer “tail to purchase” than others. “People aren’t necessarily going to see a couple of ads for a new SUV on TV and then immediately go and buy one,” says Ruby. “They actually need to be identified as in market and not just in market but likely to convert in market and even within that, there’s a much longer tail that you want to look at for performance.”
Fox is working with auto brands to figure out how to construct campaigns over time while monitoring both the performance of an individual campaign for a awareness of a new sedan model “as well as any particular behaviors of driving greater traffic into dealerships, all the way through to eventually a new lease or a new purchase.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
