Audience data will play a bigger role in this year’s upfront sales season as TV networks tout their strengths in reaching consumers among a bigger variety of platforms. Ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) services will be more prominent amid the broad shift to media consumption on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones.
“The upfront this year in some respects will be similar to years past, but in a handful respects is going to be pretty different,” Dan Aversano, senior vice president of data, analytics and advanced advertising at Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Use of data, technology and analytics, and how we’re structuring yields is changing the way that we all do business.”
Data and analytics will underpin deal making, as advertisers seek to reach target audiences more effectively, improve media attribution and optimize their spending.
” Every single market is under pressure to make the best use of their marketing dollars,” Aversano said. “Now, you have more and more marketers moving toward zero-based budgeting where they really need to justify their spend and how they’re putting those marketing dollars to work. Optimization is one of the most powerful tools to ensure that.”
Multigoal Optimization Gains Momentum
Instead of looking in the rearview mirror, optimization gives advertisers the tools to look forward, and make better predictions about outcomes — whether the goal is to raise awareness, drive foot traffic or boost sales.
“One of the most interesting pieces around optimization is multigoal optimization. It’s rare that you have a campaign that’s trying to just do one thing,” Aversano said.
Audience-based buying has become a bigger area of focus for Univision among multiple platforms beyond linear TV and traditional radio. As more Hispanic consumers watch video on connected devices like smart TVs and mobile phones, Univision is now rolling out Prende TV as its ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service. The broadcaster last month bought Spanish-language streaming service VIX to round out its digital offering.
Underrepresented Audiences
Aversano sees a need for improvements in data about the growing Hispanic consumer market, which has been underrepresented in media plans.
“A lot of the third-party data that’s out in market does not do an adequate job representing our audience of U.S. Hispanics. We at Univision want to help solve that issue,” he said. “We’re investing a lot in our own data as well as working with lots of third parties to ensure their data does a better job of representing what we think is the most underserved audiences in the U.S. today.”
Univision also is investing in data analytics to provide a more unified view of consumers among a variety of platforms, including national, local, AVOD, digital audio and radio.
“We want to be able to aggregate all of that supply and that audience, dress it with a common set of data so that now when somebody tells us there’s a particular segment that they’re interested in, we can effectively put them at the right message on the right screen at the right time, and optimize across all those touchpoints,” he said.
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