If trying to align digital and traditional media metrics has typically been like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, then the future of media measurement depends on the people who can make that happen.
At Comcast Cable’s ad sales division Effectv, the watchword is all about “convergence” – aligning the old and the new to ensure advertisers can benefit from the best of both.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Brauer, Effectv’s VP of insights and analytics, explains how he is taking on the challenge, and why.
Digital-style TV buying
“First-party data allows our advertisers to reach more specific audiences and then measure the reach and frequency within specific audience segments,” Brauer says.
“Those fundamental measures then can be connected to performance metrics. We dig into that attribution measurement, we can better understand what platforms in the media mix are driving results for their business.
“This used to be sort of really limited to digital or streaming and other natively digital platforms. But with the data we have in television now, the capabilities span all those platforms.”
Data science toolkit
Around the industry, companies are enticing TV ad buyers with capabilities their digital counterparts have long enjoyed, like data-driven targeting.
For TV, that comes at a time when traditional web and mobile identifying capabilities are being removed, leaving variants of connected TV and video in an attractive position to take new ad spend.
Effectv itself has been deploying “a data science toolkit where we can use real big data assets in order to create new, new types of insights for advertisers”, Brauer says, aiming to help advertisers understand their TV campaign in a “video” totality.
Clean room for TV
Amongst the considerations as Brauer does so, however, are the ever-present privacy requirements.
The ad-tech software industry has spawned a new category of “data clean rooms”, platforms in which companies can upload customer and audience data to do enriching and insights work in a manner that does not transgress customer privacy rules.
Effectv’s Brauer says the likes of DoubleBlock, one such clean room from the NBCUniversal-Charter-ViacomCBS JV Blockgraph, is valuable.
“It’s really about connecting the different data sets that we have at Comcast with the important data that our advertisers have,” he says. “The clean room, data protections that DoubleBlock has really help us to facilitate deeper analysis, where we know that the media measures that we’re bringing like ad impressions can be safely joined to outcome measures from the advertiser.”
You are watching “Arriving at Your Audience: Why Direct-to-Household Connectivity Is Critical for TV Advertisers,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series presented by Blockgraph. For more videos, please visit this page.