In our Ask the Expert Series, we interview leaders from our partner organizations who are helping lead their brands to new heights in AdTech. Today’s interview is with Rachel Herbstman, VP of Data Innovation, and Anastasia Dukes-Asuen, Senior Director of Advanced TV Data & Insights at Ampersand.
Could you introduce us to Ampersand and discuss your approach to TV advertising?
Ampersand, a joint venture between Comcast, Charter, and Cox, is a media sales organization that offers a unified footprint, unlocking unparalleled scale and unique data/insights for local and national advertisers. Ampersand gives advertisers true audience first planning, scale in execution, and advanced measurement of their TV investments, representing 117 million multiscreen households and over 75% of addressable households in the U.S. (64 million households). We help clients reach their unique target audience and deliver their stories – anytime, anywhere, and on whatever device.
How does adding streaming to a linear campaign, or vice versa, enhance overall campaign performance for marketers?
Herbstman: Marketers have recognized that multiscreen media strategies are the strongest as viewership continues to fragment. Unique audiences exist in traditional TV and streaming, and failure to include either media channel will reduce the total reach opportunity. These channels have proven to validate unduplicated audiences.
In our local business, adding streaming to a historically traditional linear-only media strategy increased campaign reach by 33%. Conversely, adding linear TV to a historically streaming-only media strategy increased reach by 209%. These metrics are validated by matching media exposures to an authenticated households subscriber ID and represent mass opportunities to reach new audiences with a multiscreen media strategy.
When considering reallocating media investments, how does Ampersand help clients determine the most effective channels for specific campaigns?
Herbstman: For a brand that historically invested in traditional TV, either national or local broadcast, we can provide insights to analyze the performance of any media campaign. The insights can include high-level metrics like reach and frequency and more granular metrics like unique reach per network. By seeing both the high-level results and more detailed granularity, we can provide optimization recommendations for funding other activation opportunities.
Our database of past campaigns consistently demonstrates that gaining new eyeballs with a national TV campaign usually plateaus after a few weeks. In other words, if most of your intended audience is reached after about three or four weeks of national television, reaching any new viewers can be exponentially more expensive.
We’ve built an Addressable Simulator tool for national advertisers that shows the potential impact of shifting a portion of the national media weight, specifically from the latter part of a flight, into addressable TV. Using our licensed Experian data set, we can measure any standard age/gender target or any advanced target to understand the complementary impact that addressable audience has on national media.This tool has dynamic inputs of CPMs and incidence rates, flight lengths, and budgets to simulate different scenarios and give marketers some intelligence on what holistic reach against that Experian segment they could expect with one given budget using brand-safe, traditional, and streaming inventory with an addressable activation.
Additionally, we’ve developed an interactive eCPM calculator that helps national advertisers assess the cost efficiency of adding addressable TV to their traditional campaigns. By dynamically inputting CPMs, marketers can evaluate tradeoffs between media types for upcoming campaigns.
Are there audience demographics that benefit from these combined media strategies, and what indicators or data points guide your recommendations to add cable to a local broadcast campaign versus other reallocations?
Herbstman: By including cable or streaming in a local effort, a client can use a data-driven approach to find more intended viewers in other premium content. Utilizing the vast library of Experian audience segments paired with our robust sample of 64 million data-enabled homes enables Ampersand to provide insights into the most valuable networks and dayparts that the intended viewer will likely watch on either platform.
With identity and viewing insights at scale, we can understand how consumers watch TV, even for inventory we have yet to sell. Our goal is to help marketers understand what’s happening as a result of their investments at a holistic level.
We can analyze a campaign running across hundreds of designated market areas to quickly and simply understand the holistic delivery of their broadcast and cable weight by pulling back set-top-box exposures on broadcast and Ampersand-purchased cable on our measurable footprint. Then, we can determine the share of measurable reach that each portion’s media weight contributes to.
We recommend optimizing towards a more balanced approach, where the reach levels for broadcast and cable mirror each other, creating a more effective market media mix.
Once we confirm cable’s potential in a market, we analyze network and daypart metrics to adjust key areas to optimize the campaign. We invite marketers to use these insights to measure their local or national TV campaign performance and garner unique perspectives to re-balance investments to drive reach and optimal frequencies.
Are there common missteps to avoid?
Dukes-Asuen: Ampersand’s decades of experience with media and data insights have allowed us to create an extensive database complete with targeting and measurement benchmarks. We use this database to curate best practices for brands and help set them up for success, keeping their goals and objectives for reach and frequency in mind.
Some clients spread their investment levels too thin, whether through short flight windows, low weekly frequencies, or targeting overly niche audiences that don’t fully support KPI goals.
One way to avoid these missteps is to set up a test-and-learn plan to validate a hypothesis and refine media strategies, ensuring campaigns are structured to garner meaningful insights. Ampersand can help ensure the test itself is constructed and supported to yield statistically relevant results, and the learnings can then be applied to the next campaign.
How does Experian’s data enhance your campaigns at Ampersand?
Dukes-Asuen: Within our Experian license, we can map the Experian Consumer View databases against our multichannel video programming distributors subscriber base in a privacy-compliant way to plan and activate them seamlessly. Experian has a rich set of audience targets and segmentation that we utilize to identify households that can be used for audience-based media execution with Ampersand. By defining the right audience—whether consumers are likely to purchase a product, exhibit certain behaviors, or demonstrate specific values—we enhance campaign performance and improve media spending efficiency for our advertisers.
Additionally, how do you believe AI and other new technologies will impact your media buying approaches in the future, and how might these innovations improve campaign effectiveness and provide value to your clients?
Herbstman: We have a strong use case on the measurement and analytics end. Using AI, we can aggregate a massive amount of historical data—viewership and exposure data. AI helps us understand overarching market trends and media performance to analyze campaign results and inform future campaign optimizations. The value of AI is in its role as an additional technology layer, enriching our insights portfolio and providing faster intelligence that enhances campaign effectiveness and delivers greater value to our clients.
Can you share an example of how precise audience targeting and segmentation, powered by Experian, have led to significantly better media spend reallocations and campaign performance for marketers?
One great example is how a national cruise brand dramatically improved its media spend and campaign performance by utilizing precise audience targeting and segmentation through Experian. By combining Ampersand’s addressable TV with Experian’s data-driven insights, they achieved a 14% incremental reach, a 3.1x higher frequency, and a 24% lower effective CPM. This strategic approach allowed them to reallocate their media spending more effectively, ensuring every impression reached their custom target audience.
Thanks for the interview.
For those interested in learning more about Ampersand, reach out for a personalized consultation.
Contact us
Latest posts
Cross-device matching and pixel-based foot traffic attribution reporting empower digital marketers with greater control of location-based campaigns.RALEIGH, N.C. (PRWEB) AUGUST 04, 2020 Tapad, part of Experian a global leader in digital identity resolution, and Reveal Mobile, a leader in location-based marketing, today announced a collaboration that combines Tapad's digital cross-device matching technology and pixel-based attribution features with Reveal Mobile’s VISIT Local, the software that hundreds of digital agencies and brands use for location-based analytics. The partnership is designed to drive improved performance by optimizing ad targeting and messaging for location-based campaigns. Powered by Tapad’s privacy-safe cross device matching, marketers using VISIT Local to power location-based campaigns can enhance how they reach shoppers. When one member of a household shops for groceries, clothes, household goods or any other consumer item, a conversation between multiple members of the household typically takes place beforehand. With cross device matching, marketers can reach everyone who has influence over what to buy and where to buy it. VISIT Local users can expand location-based services with a single click to include devices that share the same household, including targeting across multiple devices owned by the same user, allowing advertisers to maximize messaging and increase their share of wallet among consumers. “VISIT Local has always given our customers access to high-intent location-based audiences. With the addition of cross device matching from Tapad, advertisers can boost audience sizes up to 300 percent while maintaining full confidence in quality and relevance,” says Brian Handly, CEO of Reveal Mobile. “VISIT Local users can now apply multiple criteria and attributes to a single location-based audience, giving them the advanced control and transparency they need.” As reliable attribution becomes increasingly complex for marketers and ad buyers who need to prove value, the addition of Tapad’s pixel-based foot traffic attribution to VISIT Local enables the measurement of actual campaign effectiveness by tying ad views to in-store foot traffic. This new feature, which will be available in VISIT Local this fall, lets Reveal Mobile customers understand who visited a retail location as a result of being served an ad, providing a more accurate view into return on ad spend during and after advertising campaigns. “Tapad’s goal is to empower marketers with digital advertising efficiencies at scale across devices,” says Mark Connon, COO of Tapad. “With cross device matching and pixel-based foot traffic attribution, marketers using VISIT Local can better address the consumer’s preferences and habits, and deliver them consistently actionable information on user behavior. These capabilities advance location-based advertising in ways marketers need and want.” In addition to these new features, VISIT Local’s location-based audience builder now enables marketers to create custom audiences made up of people who have visited different places on different dates. This gives VISIT Local users the ability to segment and create the most highly targeted audiences possible. For example, a marketer who wants to advertise for a chain of restaurants can easily target visitors of different competitors in different cities. Or a marketer who wants to advertise vacation destinations can target people who have been to various resorts at different times of year. Or a marketer who wants to advertise the release of new music can target people who have been to concert venues in different cities on different dates. “Many of our customers need to create highly custom audiences so they can run experiments, test messaging, and run increasingly competitive campaigns,” says Handly. “Everyone who uses VISIT Local can now apply multiple criteria and attributes to a single location-based audience, giving them the advanced control and transparency they need.”To learn more about Tapad’s digital identity resolution products, visit our identity solution page. To learn more about Reveal Mobile’s location-based marketing offerings, visit http://www.revealmobile.com. About TapadTapad, Inc. is a global leader in digital identity resolution. The Tapad Graph, and its related solutions, provide a transparent, privacy-safe approach connecting brands to consumers through their devices globally. Our one-of-a-kind Graph Select offering enables marketers the flexibility and freedom of choice to correlate devices to varied objectives, driving campaign effectiveness and business results. Tapad is recognized across the industry for its product innovation, workplace culture and talent, and has earned numerous awards including One World Identity's 2019 Top 100 Influencers in Identity Award. Headquartered in New York, Tapad also has offices in Chicago, London, Oslo, Singapore and Tokyo. About Reveal MobileReveal Mobile is a leader in location-based marketing, analytics, audiences, and attribution. Creator of VISIT Local, VISIT Match and VISIT Data, the company’s products help digital agencies, brands and retailers of any size leverage location data to understand and reach the right audiences. Reveal Mobile is CCPA compliant and a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, which conducts an annual privacy certification. The company is based in Raleigh, NC. For more information, visit https://revealmobile.com. Contact us today
Overview Chartable leverages The Tapad Graph to improve cross-device attribution rates and remove non-addressable IPs for clients. Challenge Chartable needs to differentiate between consumer and potential business IP addresses to provide accurate household modeling and reduce excess data for their customers. Podcasting generally only has access to IP addresses as a form of digital ID which limits its ability to connect activity to individuals and extend it across all devices. The Tapad + Experian solution Using Tapad, now a part of Experian, Chartable is able to cut through the noise of IP data and discard any addresses deemed a shared IP or business. Then, Tapad + Experian connects individual users to their other digital IDs and users in their household; creating a richer attribution model for Chartable customers. Increase in podcast attribution rates Contact us today
With the growth of digital marketing and the targeting capabilities associated with online outreach, many predicted that this would mark the end of direct mail advertising. But if Millennials have anything to say about it, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Yes, believe it or not, Millennials are driving the resurgence of direct mail advertising, and many leading brands are now pivoting their omnichannel marketing plans to include direct mail. And with the USPS reporting more than 75.7 billion in marketing mail volume in 2019, this trend shows no sign of slowing down. Including direct mail in your plans may give your brand a better chance of reaching your audience. Why? 1. Millennials actually like getting mail.While most of us have decried “junk mail” as being environmentally unfriendly or just a pain to deal with, Millennials actually enjoy physical mail. Valassis recently cited research from USPS Customer & Market Insights stating that Millennials spend the most time sorting mail (about six minutes compared to the average, which is four minutes), plus they’re opening mail and reading it (at eight minutes versus the average of seven minutes). Valassis also conducted a study that showed that 68% of Millennials read print ads or inserts from retailers, and 64% prefer getting them through the mail. So, while digital outreach may be convenient, it hasn’t completely decimated the desire for that old-school, hands-on experience of opening and reading something that’s addressed to you. 2. Millennials respond to a multi-channel approach.Oftentimes, marketers think of omnichannel as being a combination of digital and TV, but when you add print into the mix, it can make an even bigger impact on Millennial audiences. Valassis found that 60% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after seeing an ad when it’s presented across both offline and online channels, while 72% of Millennial parents say print ads encourage them to go online and make a purchase from that retailer. 3. Millennials think physical mail makes for a more personal approach.You’d think that e-mail would feel more personal, but with the influx of spam most people get, that’s just not the case. In fact, 67% of people see physical mail as being more personal than an e-mail, with seven out of 10 saying they prefer receiving actual mail over digital mail. And for marketers looking to make a one-to-one connection, this is music to their ears. With changing marketing plans, the mailbox has less competition than the inbox. Getting a catalog at their door with the perfect offer at the perfect time helps the marketer make the direct connection. 4. Direct mail lasts longer than digital mail.That may seem like an obvious statement, but there’s more to it than you think. When an e-mail arrives in someone’s inbox, it’s easy to ignore it, read the subject line and forget about it, or even just randomly delete it, if spam filters don’t take care of that on their own. But the average lifespan of a piece of direct mail is 17 days, which may account for how direct mail generates purchases five times larger than e-mail campaigns. It’s harder to ignore when it’s in your house and you have to physically handle it as opposed to just clicking a mouse to get rid of it. 5. Millennials trust direct mail.It’s true—research shows that 90% of Millennials think direct mail advertising is reliable. Plus, Millennials are 24% more likely to show mail to others, compared to 19% of non-Millennials… which means if they find a deal they like in the mail, they’re probably going to spread the word. Contact us today