There’s “a huge market opportunity” in local television for dataxu, whose TotalTV linear-digital audience offering is powering Hearst’s new Hearst Anyscreen platform, says dataxu’s Mike Baker.
Hearst’s TV footprint spans 39 states where the company is now selling connected TV in conjunction with the same linear audiences for local TV, the Co-Founder, President and CEO of dataxu explains in this interview with Beet.TV at Advertising Week 2018.
“So it’s quite an innovative offering and because it’s Hearst, of course it features premium content on connected TV. And all that’s being powered by dataxu’s technology,” Baker says. “We’ve been really struck by how quickly it’s growing. Bear in mind, these are local, traditional, tier three advertisers” like movie theatres and car dealerships, the “bread and butter of local TV advertising. It’s been tremendous to see the interest in connected TV and these digital audiences, I think for good reason.”
Bringing together local linear and digital via TotalTV makes it possible to re-aggregate hard-to-reach viewers like young males who are “very hard to reach at all or with frequency on linear TV,” Baker adds.
Local TV represents roughly $25 billion of the $70 billion TV advertising industry, according to Baker, “and it has a completely different market structure. There’s targeting of course in the DMA’s and even below the DMA level, which is more possible with some of the new digital technologies like connected TV.
“So the opportunity is really to take local, geographic targeting combined with some of the more traditional ratings demography and put them together in an automated, high-efficiency, easy to operate sales machine. Groups like Hearst have hundreds of TV sellers, so you have to forecast and deliver and account for and report across many thousands of campaigns,” says Baker.
