Entering 2019, transacting advanced-television buys will continue on a publisher-by-publisher basis. But Viacom’s Bryson Gordon expects to see “a lot more integration” of advanced-TV capabilities and KPI’s into how large advertisers plan their marketing.
“What we have seen over the past twelve months is almost like a smoothing out of the market,” the EVP of Advanced Advertising explains in this interview with Beet.TV. “A lot of that starts with the question around who do I want to reach.”
In February, it will be two years since Fox, Viacom and Turner launched the OpenAP audience targeting consortium to facilitate the creation of common segments across publishers, including NBCUniversal and Univision.
Besides the cost and inconvenience of targeting specific audiences publisher by publisher, the lack of common segments had “held back the notion of driving currencies across television publishers that are now anchored in advanced segments instead of traditional demography,” says Gordon.
To underscore the emerging mindset among larger, more sophisticated advertisers, he recounts a recent meeting with a marketer for which the adoption and integration of advanced-TV techniques happens in the planning phase. The marketer was launching three sets of products in 2019 had “lined up different approaches to media buying and different KPIs against all of those.”
It’s also an example of how more campaigns are bringing together media and creative so that “for the distinct custom audience segments that they are building for these product launches, every distinct segment has a distinct creative,” says Gordon.
He goes on to explain how the investments Viacom has made in its Vantage targeting and optimization offerings are “not just about optimizing against linear inventory on a national basis but we have the capability to extend optimized linear campaigns into addressable inventory,” be it MVPD, OTT or other VOD inventory.
“When you can do that, not only can you do things like truly understand how to maximize reach against an individual audience segment, but you can also really start to understand how a particular creative is performing against a segment and against the KPI that you’re trying to drive.”
Vantage has primarily been oriented toward optimizing for either audience concentration as a KPI or achieving de-duplicated reach, according to Gordon. But Viacom is seeing a move toward what he terms outcome optimization.
“Maybe I’m driving a campaign where I’m trying to get people to sign up for a service, product or whatever. We now have this ability to actually look at the outcome data, conversion data, plug that back into the optimization process and throughout the campaign start to actually optimize for that outcome and for that strategic audience segment,” says Gordon.
This video is part the Beet.TV preview series “The Road to CES 2019.” The series is presented by dataxu. For more videos, please visit this page.
