The same 90 million shopper loyalty cards that have long fueled Nielsen Catalina Solutions’ digital advertising targeting and measurement efforts are helping to open doors to household addressable. “It’s just the mechanics of doing it differ as to where it goes,” says Tom Eaton, the company’s SVP of TV & Programmatic Solutions.
“We’ve had to establish relationships basically all or the main MVPD’s in order to know who their universe is. We apply our data on top of that,” Eaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
It’s all about delivering “hard data” as opposed to intent-based metrics. “It’s actual people or homes who went out and bought a product.”
As an example, Eaton cites peanut butter. If Skippy is the brand doing the targeting, “you want to talk to Skippy buyers. It could be competitive buyers as well. The idea that it’s the people who are buying the product are the ones you want to target. Not necessarily an age gender or a loose demographic.”
As the result of years of “evangelizing” the utility of its data, Nielsen Catalina is seeing many advertisers taking its data onto new platforms. The company didn’t have the luxury of saying it wasn’t ready for, say, addressable TV, according to Eaton.
“When a big advertiser comes and says ‘I want to use the data that I’ve been using digital but I’m going over to,’ name the MVPD, we had to find a way to do it. So we did.”
It all comes back to the shopper loyalty data, along with names and addresses of the shoppers. “And every MVPD has a name and address on the set-top box,” says Eaton. Nielsen Catalina uses Experian to combines an MVPD’s set-top box universe to its shopper card universe.
“We have what we would like to call panel. They tell us a product they want to market, we tell them the homes where the people live.”
Using the same data can change the way networks sell their inventory, from targeting based on age and gender to specific product consumption.
“It does change how a plan can be built by the networks. Or how it’s planned by the advertiser,” Eaton says.
As MVPD’s get deeper into the addressable game, linear broadcast networks are saying “we have to come up with a solution that allows the marketers to have a more precise delivery of a campaign. It’s meeting the need that the advertisers want to be more efficient in the way they plan and buy their media.”
This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
