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.
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Advertisers are always looking for ways to improve the targeting and effectiveness of their campaigns. One strategy that's gaining popularity lately is using curated private marketplace (PMP) deals, allowing advertisers to buy premium ad inventory in a private auction environment. But how do data providers and PMPs work together to make PMP advertising more successful? What is a private marketplace (PMP)? Advertising PMPs, or private marketplace deals, are a type of programmatic advertising where advertisers and publishers negotiate and set up a direct deal between themselves to buy or sell advertising inventory in a private auction environment. In PMP deals, publishers can make their premium inventory available to a select group of advertisers, who can bid on it in a private auction using demand-side platforms (DSPs). These private auctions typically offer higher-quality inventory and a more targeted audience than open exchange auctions, which are accessible to all advertisers. However, traditional PMPs had their limitations, including often being limited to accessing inventory from a single publisher group. Audigent takes PMP advertising to the next level with SmartPMPs Audigent's key differentiator is that instead of activating audience data from the DSP, which is the industry standard, they integrate directly with supply-side platforms (SSPs). By taking this route, audience data and inventory from hundreds or even thousands of publishers can now be packaged together into a single deal ID / SmartPMP. SmartPMPs empower media buyers with the ability to access and buy against unique, customizable data segments on premium curated publisher inventory in combinations that otherwise would not have been available. Activating data via the supply-side also enables supply-side optimizations. This means that instead of simply being a data provider, Audigent plays an active role in the success of media buyers' programmatic campaigns by optimizing toward performance goals in coordination with demand-side buyers. The result is the full alignment of demand- and supply-side technologies for the first time in programmatic. SmartPMPs drive campaign performance Audigent performance data compared to the programmatic open exchange: How Experian and Audigent partner in PMP advertising Experian and Audigent collaborate using Consumer View audience data. By supplying valuable insights into users' interests, behaviors, and demographics, we help advertisers create more targeted and personalized ad campaigns with Audigent. This can lead to higher engagement rates, greater brand awareness, and increased conversions for Audigent and Experian clients. By activating Experian data via Audigent SmartPMPs, advertisers unlock the ability to reach highly engaged users across premium, curated inventory sources on key channels like connected TV (CTV), display, video, and more. Unlock the potential of programmatic advertising with us Our strategic collaboration with Audigent is transforming the programmatic advertising space. Our partnership enables our customers to tailor their ads directly to their desired audience. This elevated personalization results in higher conversion rates and optimized campaigns for superior ROI performance. Contact us for more information about our digital audience segments on the Audigent platform. To learn more about our partner Audigent, visit www.audigent.com. Contact us Latest posts
A successful back-to-school campaign strategy starts with identifying the key audience segments to target. Over half of all searches related to back-to-school happen within a select group of consumers – knowing which ones can go a long way in forming an effective marketing strategy. Focus on this smaller, targeted set to maximize your efforts. With over $72 billion projected in total U.S. back-to-school retail sales this year, you can capture more spend than ever before during this big shopping season by tailoring your strategy to a smaller set of targeted shoppers. Experian data can help you make the most of your back-to-school campaigns by uncovering the top five back-to-school audiences. Five audience segments for 2023 Our data provides key insights into who these shoppers are and how to reach them, allowing you to create personalized content tailored to their needs. What are the top five audiences you should add to your 2023 back-to-school campaign? High-Net-Worth Households Bilingual Multi-Generational Households Suburban Savvy Shoppers Young Suburban Families Tech-Savvy Families What do these audiences look like? Who are they? Where do they shop? Let's review each audience in a little more detail. High-Net-Worth Households This group consists of households with above-average income and education levels. They often lease luxury cars, purchase products in every channel, travel extensively, and are philanthropic supporters of the arts. Key features Wealthy Highly educated Lease luxury cars Purchase products in every channel Travelers Philanthropic supporters of the arts Bilingual Multi-Generational Households Large households in multilingual neighborhoods, filled with married parents and their kids. They are financially cautious, bilingual, and participate in team sports. Key features Bilingual Large households Married with kids Financially cautious Team sports Suburban Savvy Shoppers Middle-aged couples and families who earn above-average incomes, maintain active lifestyles, and spend their money on quality home products and furnishings. Key features Affluent Athletic activities Home products & furnishings Sporting goods High-priced children’s clothing Young Suburban Families This segment includes households in the middle child-rearing stages of life, typically with a dual income household and multiple children of school age. They typically have spacious single-family residences in suburban neighborhoods that are slightly above average in housing values. On weekends, these suburban young families often engage in activities like skateboarding, biking, and video games with their children. Key features Comfortable lifestyle Children’s games Wholesale members Family-centric activities Tech-Savvy Families Highly educated, affluent couples in their peak earning years, with a preference for both traditional and digital media, who live in upscale housing and are savvy investors and environmental philanthropists. Key features Highly educated Affluent Upscale housing Savvy investors Environmental philanthropists Tech apprentices Watch our 2024 video for tips from industry leaders for back-to-school In our new Q&A video with Experian experts, we explore changing consumer behaviors surrounding back-to-school shopping in 2024. In the video, we discuss: Anticipated shifts in consumer behaviors and shopping habits Tactics we predict marketers will employ to navigate signal loss Which channels will be the most successful And more! Watch now Latest posts
The AdTech industry is undergoing rapid changes as it adjusts to the impacts of data deprecation and ever-changing privacy regulations. At the same time, there are fears of a potential economic downturn. How should you handle marketing in a recession? What should your marketing mix look like? In this blog post, we'll cover how to navigate this uncertainty and three essential ingredients for your marketing mix. First, we'll look at the complexity and uncertainty facing marketers. Turbulence with Twitter After Elon Musk's Twitter takeover in October 2022, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers left the platform and started to seek out alternatives. The retail media boom In the next four years, Forrester Research projects that U.S. retail media ad sales will double to reach 85 billion by 2026.1 Most of this growth is catalyzed by CPG and consumer electronic brands that have a scarcity of zero- and first-party data; they need more media closer to the point of purchase, especially as CFOs are scrutinizing budgets. Consumption continues to fragment It's becoming harder than ever to reach the right person, at the right time, predict their intent, and get a 360-degree view of your customer.2 Data deprecation is top of mind According to Forrester Research, updating their data strategy to address data deprecation is the number one priority for marketers. Addressing data deprecation is also a priority for consumers, who increasingly feel that audience targeting is more intrusive than beneficial.3 Data deprecation affects identity solutions Third-party data and mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) are the connective tissue for identity solutions. As we see those signals go away, there are fewer linkages to resolve identity and it's leading to a rise in fragmented, duplicated, and shallow identity. Recession fears In addition to everything happening in AdTech, there are also fears of a possible recession. According to Forrester, 40% of Gen Z and 41% of Millennials believe fears of an upcoming recession are greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, only 24% of Gen X and 12% of Baby Boomers agree.4 Navigate uncertainty and marketing in a recession With the current macroeconomic conditions, data deprecation, and fragmented consumption in mind, what should your strategy look like for marketing in a recession? Forrester recommends three strategies: People-led planningTest creativeOptimize for marginal costs People-led planning Planning doesn't have to be fragmented. Map offline and online media exposures to consumer decision journeys. Strategies like lifetime value (LTV) driven audience segmentation to correlate awareness at top of the funnel layered with demand generation exposures harvested later in the funnel. To do this, it's crucial to work with providers that give you visibility into the audience buyer's journey to awareness, intent, consideration, and purchase, all the way through to loyalty.5 Test creative Make your creative work harder for you. Apply the same rigor with your creative that you applied to segmentation. Utilize multivariate testing to identify creative that is winning or losing. When you understand how each variable performs, you can scale the variables with creative optimization to have a material impact on performance. Optimize for marginal costs Optimize for marginal costs of acquisition, not just the average. Adjust for incrementality – what is the cost to acquire one more customer, rather than the average cost of acquisition. Find the right marketing mix in a recession With these changes in mind, how can you find the right marketing mix in a recession? We can show you the way. You can create the right marketing mix with three key ingredients: Audiences Identity Activation Let’s explore each ingredient to start you down the path toward marketing campaign success. Audiences: Know your customer The first ingredient to add to your marketing mix in a recession is your audience. Knowing your customer is key to targeting the right audiences successfully. Data-driven targeting can help you find your best audiences based on demographics, modeled lifestyles, and behaviors to improve marketing campaign performance. Not sure where to start when it comes to developing your target audience strategy? We can help. We track digital usage of our data used by advertisers and identified the top four digital audiences that advertisers purchased over the last four years. Four digital audiences to consider Marketing strategies are only as strong as the data foundation they’re built on. The top four digital audiences that advertisers are purchasing from Experian include: Demographics Behavioral Modeled Lifestyles Custom Audiences Demographics Examples include age, gender, relationship status, living situation, life experience, and employment. Behavioral This audience allows marketers to identify households that are more likely to engage in certain activities or belong to certain groups. Modeled Lifestyles Experian’s Mosaic® USA segmentation. This is a household-based consumer lifestyle segmentation system that classifies all U.S. households and neighborhoods into 71 unique types and 19 overarching groups, providing a 360-degree view of consumers’ choices, preferences, and habits. Custom Audiences This is an audience blended from multiple sources or derived from first-party look-alike modeling. Changes in digital audience strategies Over the last four years, Modeled Lifestyles and Custom Audience purchases represented the smallest share of digital activation, while Behavioral and Demographic segments were more popular with advertisers. When the U.S. rolled out the COVID-19 vaccine, consumers became more active. People were shopping in stores, returning to the gym, and taking trips that they had postponed during the height of the pandemic. Marketers turned to higher compositions of Demographic and Modeled Lifestyles to reach these audiences between April and December of 2021. Sustained growth in Demographic audience activation could suggest a move back to tried and true audience strategies as signals continue to decline and amid evolving regulation. With economic uncertainty, marketers return to what they know. Traditional targeting methods like Demographics and Modeled Lifestyles are the baseline of many marketing strategies and we predict that we will continue to see marketers activating against these data sets. Download our 2023 digital audience trends and predictions report to discover our full insights on how digital activation has changed and where we’re headed. Identity: Understand the customer journey Identity resolution is the next ingredient that you should add to your marketing mix in a recession. It should be a foundational element of every marketer's strategy. What is identity resolution? In the simplest terms, identity resolution is the process of matching different devices, IDs, and touchpoints back to a single person. Identity resolution expands marketers' addressability and reach of their target audience and helps inform and measure accurate customer journeys. Identity resolution challenges Identity resolution faces two main challenges: Making the data actionable. Humans are complex. We have behaviors that change based on our current social groups and life events, we use dozens of internet-connected devices in a single day, and we exhibit distinct behaviors that happen online and in the physical world. This means marketers have mounds of data being collected from different channels based on that dynamic behavior of people, making it feel impossible to organize the data in a way that makes it feel actionable, know how it ties back to real humans, and ensure they're doing it in a responsible and compliant way. Signal loss. Marketers continue to lose important signals that they've previously been able to rely on to inform their next move. Signals are being lost as our industry places more privacy regulations and restrictions on what can be tracked and as consumers themselves change behaviors to protect their privacy. As consumer behaviors continue to change and signals disappear, identity resolution gets exponentially harder. Expand addressability and reach with identity resolution Data deprecation adversely affects identity solutions, but identity resolution should be a key ingredient in your marketing mix. Identity resolution ensures that consumers experience more relevant products, offers, and messaging – allowing you to reap the ROI benefits of hitting consumers at the perfect point in their journey. Finding an identity resolution partner When selecting an identity resolution partner, you should understand the data and processes that are implemented behind the scenes. It's important to know: What makes up their consumer database?How fresh is their data?What identifiers can they match?How do they protect consumer privacy? At Experian, we're rooted in deterministic offline data which creates a stable foundation. We then layer in digital and behavioral touchpoints. We have decades of experience managing consumer data safely. We have insights on 250 million individuals, three billion devices, and one trillion device signals. Our databases evolve as quickly as the human behavior powering them does. Our approach to identity resolution is open and agnostic. This means we can collect and ingest nearly all available offline and online identifiers. We can do this in all types of environments, including connected TV (CTV), mobile, and cookieless. We have two types of identity resolution: OfflineDigital This ensures we control how known and anonymous data points are connected for consumer privacy purposes. Identity resolution in action Our depth of data gives our clients access to see the whole human and gain the context around singular data points. Let's walk through an example of our identity resolution capabilities. Challenge Our TV media platform client needed to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign they were running on behalf of a leading consumer electronics brand. The TV platform wanted to be able to accurately report on which consumers made a purchase after seeing the brand’s TV commercial on their platforms. Solution Using our digital identity resolution services, our client could capture online purchases made on the brand’s website and link them back to a consumer profile. In addition to online transactions, our client used our offline resolution services to resolve email addresses of consumers that purchased offline, using warranty registration details. With online and offline purchase data now resolved back to an individual ID, we also performed identity resolution on viewers in their TV subscriber files that had also been exposed to the TV commercial. This allowed us to identify subscribers that had both seen the ad and purchased a product. We provided our client with a packaged report that they could white-label and pass along to the brand. Results By providing this attribution reporting to the brand, the TV platform could validate the ROI spent on their platform. The brand was extremely satisfied with the results, and they transitioned the one-off TV commercial into an ongoing campaign and purchased quarterly measurement. This led to solid recurring revenue for the TV platform. Activation: Experiment and measure the impact The third and final ingredient to finding the right marketing mix in a recession is activation. Experimentation is the best way to determine which channels work best for your business and provide the most ROI. Demand-side platforms (DSP), video platforms, and sell-side targeting are three important activation channels that you should consider experimenting with. Demand-side platforms We continue to see increased demand for environments where alternative identifiers are being transacted (like DSPs and video). Social channels are decreasing; this can be attributed to changes in privacy, security, and concerns around brand safety. Amazon’s DSP is catching up with Google and Meta to become a top ad platform. Video platforms Digital video and other video channels like over-the-top (OTT) and CTV will continue to grow. Digital video will capture the most ad spend in 2023 (22.4% in 2023 vs 19.3% in 2022). Because of this, advertisers are placing bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. Sell-side targeting Data sharing relationships will become strongest on the sell-side as we move toward consented first-party data. Ad dollars are shifting to channels that use the sell-side approach, like retail media and CTV. Sell-side targeting enables brands to access large amounts of inventory across publishers and retailers. By getting closer to the ad inventory, advertisers can future-proof their strategies by having more access to better data signals. Direct relationships like these will be necessary as privacy regulations increase and signal loss continues. We can help you find the right marketing mix in a recession Now is the time to be opportunistic. Gaining share of voice during a downturn is cost-effective. Proactive marketing builds pent-up demand. Delivering the right message in the right place at the right time means truly knowing your prospects and customers as individuals. At Experian, we bring you the highest-resolution picture of people, so you and your customers can connect with confidence. You can turn prospects into customers with the right audience. By understanding your customers better, you can find more like them. Together we can power better results. Get started Find the right marketing mix Check out our webinar, "Find the right marketing mix with rising consumer expectations." Guest speaker, Nikhil Lai, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, joined Experian experts Erin Haselkorn and Eden Wilbur. Watch the recording to learn: New data on the complexity and uncertainty facing marketersConsumer trends for 2023Recommendations on finding the right channel mix and the right consumers Watch now Sources 2022 Retail Media Ad Sales Forecast, US. Forrester Research, Inc. 2022. Forrester Analytics Consumer Technographics® Technology, Media, and Telecom Topic Insights 1 Survey. Forrester Research, Inc. 2020. CMO Pulse Survey. Forrester Research, Inc. July 2021. Forrester's Consumer Energy And Retail Online Survey. Forrester Research, Inc.People-Led Planning Solves Customer Problems to Drive Growth. Forrester Research, Inc. August 2, 2021. Latest posts