AT&T’s more than 170 million consumer relationships—north of 140 million of them in the mobile space—generate a ton of data. For Turner, the data from those relationships will be the basis for optimizing and guaranteeing campaigns based on business outcomes.
Such guaranteed optimization could emerge by late this year or early 2020, Turner’s Dan Aversano explains in this interview at the recent Beet.TV leadership forum titled Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World.
By combining behavioral and viewing data from AT&T’s digital and television assets “we can now add in some fairly simply analytics to understand when and where people are exposed to ads and then use causal analytics to actually prove that they’re taking an action,” says the SVP of Ad Innovation & Programmatic Solutions.
An example in the auto industry could be “being able to prove the visitation that’s driven to a particular auto dealership because of the campaign they ran on TBS or a campaign they ran on CNN Go,” says Aversano. “That’s step one. Step two, where this data gets really interesting is how we start to make it actionable.”
Many advertisers are unsure exactly who they should be targeting or uncertain when it comes to building audience segments. Those in themselves have typically consumed many weeks of conversation.
“Now that we have these analytics that we’ve built and we’re automating them so they’re fast and fairly inexpensive for us to run, we can do that at scale.” Analyzing historical campaigns to understand who actually converted provides a “seed set” that can be modeled up. “Now I have an ROI-defined segment,” Aversano adds.
Moving even higher up the value chain is the ability to optimize media campaigns based on output. “This is where you forget about the who for a second.” Historical data from Turner media can show “when I put this brand’s ad here, how many people go to the dealership, two people for this unit, three people for this unit.
“So all of a sudden, now I’m building a media schedule not based on how many impressions or GRP’s it’s going to deliver against a demo or segment, but based on how many actual physical location visits you’re going to get. It’s optimizing for the actual outcome.”
If all goes by plan, Turner could end up providing outcome guarantees by the end of this year or early next year.
Asked by interviewer Howard Shimmel, President of Janus Strategy and Insights, how all the data can help to inform advertising from top to bottom of the purchase funnel, Aversano says “Putting that puzzle together is really, really tricky.” Backed by a lot of proprietary research into, among other things, consumer journey mapping, “We’re pushing hard on it.”
This video was produced in New York City at Identity in Focus: Understanding the Cross-Screen Consumer in a Fragmented World, a Beet.TV Leadership Forum, presented by 4INFO and hosted by Viacom. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
