LOS ANGELES – Marketers can harness a combination of TV viewership and mobile usage data to gain a better understanding of how to engage consumers. Those insights are crucial to developing a media plan and making adjustments as needed.
“Consumers are watching TVs and engaging with their mobile phones simultaneously as they’re engaging with our ad experiences,” Kelly Metz, managing director of linear activation at Omnicom Media Group, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The way we choose to manage that or support that from a planning perspective is by emphasizing holistic campaign planning and holistic campaign measurement.”
With many consumers watching TV while looking at their smartphones at the same time, advertisers have more sources of data to help understand how their ads are seen.
“All of that factors into mobile data, TV data coming together to derive insights and make those better planning decisions and measurement decisions,” Metz said. “The use case for mobile data is to have more effective plans. We need to understand mobile ad exposure in the home to truly understand influence of the advertising campaign and the influence of the different screens.”
Advertisers have reason to be optimistic about the pace of innovation, though Metz cautions that the amount of data generated by consumers can create conflicting signals.
“There’s a certain realization that signals will never be in perfect harmony. Anyone who’s ever dealt with data, and we know big data really well, frequently you get conflicting signals,” she said. “It’s about really embracing the fact that signals will contradict. Signals will be bad, and you have to have the right data infrastructure and approach and the flexibility to be able to address that.”
The pandemic led to a dramatic shift in viewing habits, with many people sampling the programming on streaming platforms as they spent more time stuck at home. The cord-cutting trend accelerated as more households connected their TVs directly to the internet.
“We were prepared for these changes. We just expected them to happen at a slower rate,” Metz said. “The key is to focus on that cross-screen consumer engagement, and to enable planning insights across screens.”
While audience data are vital to media planning, marketers also need to be mindful that they’re using the information in a way that’s considerate of consumers.
“You’ve got to start with the right data. You’ve got to clean that data, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re 100% compliant with everything the consumer would want you to do, to be respectful of that data use,” Metz said.
You are watching “Data: Powering CTV for Marketers,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Sabio. For more videos, please visit this page.
