Marketers are finding ways to harness mobile data to improve their audience targeting as consumers spend more time with digital media. To avoid overexposing consumers to the same ads among different connected devices, such as smart TVs and mobile phones, brands combine different sources of data to gain more insights into media consumption behavior.
“We essentially leverage platform-specific technology providers using deterministic data because they do have access to connected TV data,” Jeff Liang, head of digital product at WPP’s MediaCom, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Many times, they match that against and identity graph with multiple device IDs, which allows us to control the exposure of those ads to different digital devices.”
With millions of consumers using their smartphones while watching TV, or “second-screening,” marketers have another way to interact with viewers. In some cases, advertisers are showing QR codes in commercials for viewers to scan with a smartphone and visit a shopping site.
“E-commerce is really an important activity that more and more technology providers are starting to build,” Liang said. “The shopping mindset for CTV viewers will start to change. Right now, most CTV viewers aren’t necessarily ready to pull out their credit card while they’re sitting on the couch watching CTV programming.”
However, CTV platforms do provide ways to personalize the viewing experience. For example, sports fans can look up stats about players and teams while watching a game.
“That personalization of the CTV experience will continue in e-commerce as well,” Liang said. “We’ll eventually get to a point where we’ll be able to allow for comparison shopping on CTV and give consumers the ability to transact within that single remote device rather than driving people to their mobile phones.”
Source: Marketing Charts, Integral Ad Science
The rise in media consumption among multiple devices challenges marketers to capture viewer attention, possibly by integrating their brand messaging within the content of shows. Meanwhile, improved ad targeting increases the likelihood of reaching target audiences through CTV.
“There’s been a lot of connection between all the different data sets that would allow us to target on connected TV better,” Liang said. “That includes rolling mobile data into identity graphs that really tells us a lot of information about a specific user. Mobile is probably one of the best signal-collection devices that we have today.”
The variety of data about geolocation, app usage, personal interests and health activity helps to develop a more complete picture of consumers, even as technology companies give people more control over their personal data. Apple, as one example, last month updated the software that runs devices including the iPhone to ask customers for permission to share an identifier for advertisers (IDFA) with apps and websites. Apple installs the identifiers on every one of its products.
“With all the challenges that we have today with IDFA being removed, which is causing a lot of headaches, I don’t necessarily think that this process of aggregating data and gaining a better understanding of who that user is will go away,” Liang said. “As time goes on, we’ll have the ability to take offline data, take other disparate sources of data, connect them together and build a better experience across all the advertising formats that are emerging now.”
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