Automation and programmatic may not be overtaking the traditional TV advertising space anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean advanced targeting and digital data sets aren’t already making a big impact. eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher spoke with Joshua Summers, CEO of linear television supply-side platform (SSP) clypd, about the latest trends surrounding the incorporation of more advanced targeting tactics into the traditional TV space.
Joshua Summers, CEO clypd
eMarketer: On the advanced TV and even programmatic TV advertising front, one of the biggest trends seems to be the use of secondary targets or audience guarantees. And increasingly, buyers are looking to leverage digital audiences for those guarantees. Do you see this trend playing out as well?
Joshua Summers: Yes. A lot of digital DMPs data management platforms are trying to move into the television side. And whether it’s a platform like Lotame, or Adobe’s Audience Manager, or Oracle’s BlueKai, or Nielsen Marketing Cloud, all of these players house significant amounts of data in the digital world, and they’ve done significant work in creating segments and advanced targets that are applied in the digital world. Now there are a bunch of advertisers and agencies that want to be able to leverage that work in television now.
eMarketer: How far along is the industry in being able to do that?
Summers: The next step is coming up with the appropriate methodologies for matching those targets, whether through a direct match with a third-party match provider, or through a more aggregated, index-based approach. Making these more of a part of the linear TV workflow is the next big thing. We’ve already seen a considerable amount of this happening in our platform where advertisers say, “I house my segments in this platform, and now I want to increase the efficacy of that target in linear TV.”
eMarketer: How much of this momentum is driven by digital wanting to extend into linear vs. the traditional TV buyers wanting to get better at understanding their audiences?
Summers: There are two sides to this, and they’re exactly as you laid them out. But there’s a chasing of dollars across the border. Digital folks want to expand their ability to sell into linear, and linear folks want to expand the ability to sell into digital. Each side has the same goal: to cross that line.
Marketers want to increase the effectiveness of their buys, no matter where they’re delivered. And the way they’ve learned to do that in digital is through advanced data sets, whether it’s first-party, CRM-type lists or third-party data sets. They want to be able to leverage that.
Media owners want to be able to leverage that, too. They’re working with one core principle: The amount of media they have to sell is a constrained asset. It’s not an unlimited pool of inventory, and they have to figure out a way to make their inventory more interesting to the dollars that are being spent. This is about optimizing the way that inventory delivers for the target, and being able to leverage that to improve their yield against all their inventory.
