LONDON — It is now more than a year since GroupM launched Finecast, a new subsidiary to bring together various strands of addressable TV advertising.
What comes next? Maybe getting it in to the hands of media agencies, says the man who runs the product.
“We’re looking to bring that out into markets, so the agencies can use that themselves,” says Finecast head of product, data and analytics Clive Page in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Last year, the agency launched Finecast, spanning multiple TV channels, pay-TV platforms, set-top boxes, video-on-demand services, over-the-top providers and game consoles.
Finecast offers advertisers access to 180 different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data. It is integrated with GroupM’s [m]Platform along with such major industry data platforms as Acxiom, Experian, MasterCard and Kantar to power audience discovery and targeting.
But Finecast is not yet in primetime.
“Ultimately, it’s a sort of soft launch in a way,” Page adds. “We have it internally, we’re stress-testing it, if you like, it’s sort of beta tested. We’ve held its feet to the fire somewhat more recently – we’ve actually demonstrated to our clients.”
“The first step will be to the agency operatives so they will be able to use it, understand where their audience is being seen, understand where they’re getting the best reach and optimize their campaigns using our technology.
“Then ultimately, I don’t see why that shouldn’t go to clients as well to give them insight.”
Finecast has aggregated video ad inventory in programming from some of the UK’s main commercial broadcasters, like Channel 4, Channel 5, STV, Discovery and Disney, plus over most main set-top and over-the-top devices, from Sky’s satellite box to games consoles.
“We take the disparate supply sources of media that is addressable, and we corral that all into one place and then we add layers of insight and technology to that to bring value to our proposition,” Page adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Future of TV Advertising Forum 2018, London. The series is sponsored by Finecast. For more segments from the series, visit this page.
