Contrary to some thinking, local advertisers quite often know who their existing and potential customers are. They just don’t always know how best to reach them, but local audience segments that weren’t available three years ago are helping to solve that.
“The local marketers are some of the most sophisticated marketers that you’ll find out there,” says Comcast Spotlight Chief Revenue Officer Brendan Condon. “Primarily because when you think about their investment spend in media, in advertising, it could be a significant portion of their operating expense. So they can’t afford to make mistakes.”
In this Beet.TV interview at the recent Advanced Advertising Forum in Manhattan, Condon offers up the example of a local pizza client.
“I know exactly who my audiences are,” he quotes the client as saying. There’s the CEO of food (“the mom feeding her children”) followed by sports fanatics “who are only ordering pizza when they’re watching sports.” Then there is “this other segment of people who are buying pizza because it’s more cost effective or an efficient way to save money and yet have a sustainable meal while watching television or doing anything else.”
Armed with those insights, Comcast Spotlight produced three different audiences by types of viewers, the content they watch on TV and the corresponding geographic trading areas. Then it created “different proposals and plans so that they could have different creative or different messaging with the same creative to three different audiences, again within the same geography,” Condon says. “Three years ago we could not do that.”
Condon arrived at Comcast Spotlight in the fall of 2018 from AdMore, an audience-based programmatic television advertising platform, and REVShare, one of the nation’s largest short-form direct-response providers, at Cannella Media. He explains how Comcast Spotlight has reorganized to get even closer to local advertisers.
“We’ve de-layered the management team so that not only the senior leadership but all the way down to the sellers they’re freed up to spend more time with their clients. Being consultants and understanding what’s their business, what are the nuances and the challenges that they have and how can we provide a scalable viable solution for them.”
Part of the process is re-educating local businesses to the reality of modern-day TV consumption, given that the average household watches 17-plus networks on any given day.
“For us as an MVPD or anyone within the industry, you have to be able to go broader to get across those networks and go deep with the same level of out-of-pocket costs so that you’re therefore becoming much more efficient,” says Condon.
For marketers that have always wanted just to advertise in primetime programming, he cites The New TV-a recent white paper showing how just over two-thirds of all viewing occurs outside of primetime. Others have just wanted to be in live programming consisting of news and sports.
“There’s other things that happen episodically live that we can target on the localized basis on your behalf that will be just as effective if not even maybe more efficient than what you’ve been traditionally doing,” Condon says.
Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.
