Amid the push for more performance-based advertising campaign outcomes from deterministic consumer identities, Horizon Media is building its own identity solution. “With the help of our partners, we can now attach that ID to build the deterministic ID. That’s going to allow us to advertise more one to one and get more toward people based marketing if you will and get more targeted,” says Chief Data Officer Laura McElhinney.
“Looking at a deterministic ID needs to be the way that we move,” McElhinney explains in this Beet.TV interview at the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan.
As part of that push, the media agency has been working on a new entity called Big, which Advertising Age reports will operate under a 100% performance-based model. It’s part of Horizon’s quest to have more than half of its ad deals to be guaranteed on business outcomes within the next three to five years.
“We want to make sure that we’re spending our money in the right way and that we’re reaching our audience effectively, that we’re not overdoing it, that we’re not saturating it so much that they’re leaving the brand, that we’re upsetting them,” says McElhinney.
Asked about the availability of targeting data, she says it’s still not easy enough to obtain.
“Not all of our vendors are going to give us back the data that we need, and not all of our clients will even give us first-party data to the point that it would be super helpful to us.”
With the 2019 television Upfront events already under way, McElhinney believes they are still an essential ritual. “The Upfronts aren’t going to go away. Relationships are very important, those conversations up front are very important. Reach frequency doesn’t go away, impressions and GRP’s don’t go away,” she says.
What has been changing “is that we have more data available to us that we can now marry that with that way of buying, that way of approaching the TV audience.” More data available will help to inform deterministic ID’s and “get more addressable, get more targeted to a tighter audience. As opposed to just throwing a big net over it.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.
