With its roots in local print, radio and television advertising, Cox’s Gamut has been branching out in recent years via partnerships with national TV networks for their OTT inventory. “So now we have an opportunity to be able to help local buyers kind of round out their entire local market video spend, get incremental reach and be more cost effective,” says Gamut President Rachel Williamson.
Williamson held various roles at Cox beginning in 2006, with stops along the way at Cumulus Media and Nielsen Audio. Upon assuming her present role, “we really felt like we had a right to win in video,” Williamson says in this Beet.TV interview at the recent Tru Optik InFronts event in Manhattan.
What she’s seeing in OTT “is an early adoption through great partners like Tru Optik where we can start to understand cookie data into the household level through their graphing,” Williamson says.
One thing that’s needed is “a little bit more scale. So now we look at models.” This is because unlike traditional television metrics based on panel-based, probabilistic data, “Within digital we really value one-to-one type of transactions” requiring a different kind of modeling.
“What we’re trying to figure out now is how to we take the best of both and create a new type of model or new type of application with data to be able to not only be more effective and efficient in our targeting, but also have more accountability on the back end with performance.”
It’s long been said of broadcast and cable that people would buy local if it were more easy and efficient. “Who wouldn’t want a strategic plan for every single DMA? We know when you buy national you get very heavy in the top five markets and then typically national advertisers come back in and fill in in the scatter market.
“So I think we’re getting to a point where with more addressable television, those lines between national and local are getting very blurred because you can get much more targeted than you could in the past with linear.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Tru Optik InFronts 2019, NYC. The series is sponsored by Tru Optik. For additional videos, please visit this page.
