Whether it’s knowing what your customers are watching or how to reach audiences watching certain programs, having access to TV viewing behavior can take your personalization and real-time targeting to the next level.
If you are new to the TV advertising business, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype about the targeting capabilities of smart TVs. Yes, smart TVs are being adopted rapidly and yes, they are prompting more brands to consider adding TV to their programmatic buys.
The fact Is, however, that much of the technology underlying smart TVs has been in use by the cable and satellite TV industry for decades and BDEX has been collecting data signals from tens of millions of addressable.
The BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) contains more than 14 billion data points from addressable cable TV, including more than providing insight into when, how often and for how long tens of millions of U.S. consumers view hundreds of channels, genres, and shows.
A quick query of the Arts/Television industry using the
Query the Arts/Video industry and you can explore 13 and see what contact information we have for 65 million unique users who have downloaded/streamed comedy film from the Internet or the 96 million who have used pay-per-view to watch an action movie.
The BDEX DXP provides the data you need to connect with tens of millions of cable TV, satellite TV, and streaming video service customers based on their viewing habits.
This rich psychographic data can be used to refine audience segmentation or personalization whether you use programmatic TV advertising or not. In late March, a marketer could have used our data to reach 12 million people who had watched Game of Thrones in the prior four weeks via 6.3 million email addresses, 2.9 million U.S. postal address and 2.2 million smartphone IDs.
Other misconceptions
While it’s true that advertisers have been slow to exploit addressable cable TV’s programmatic capabilities, that’s due largely to three big misconceptions about programmatic TV advertising, according to Bett Hurwitz, business lead for advanced TV at Verizon Media Group. The biggest of those is the perception that due to higher CPMs, programmatic TV advertising only makes sense when trying to reach small audiences.
Hurwitz counters that insights gathered through a small amount of programmatic TV advertising can improve the ROI on linear TV ad spending. For instance, a marketer could invest five percent of their overall TV advertising budget in non-linear TV (streaming, DVR, video-on-demand, over-the-top (OTT) or mobile technology that facilitates time shifting) to find out when and what their target audience is watching. They could then use that information to spend the remainder of their TV advertising budget more wisely.
As Hurwitz points out, predictions of TVs rapid demise seem more hype than reality.
From 2010 to 2014, TV remained more effective at achieving advertisers’ KPIs than online display, paid search, print and direct marketing advertising across multiple industries, according to a comprehensive study by Neustar MarketShare sponsored by Turner Broadcasting Company and Horizon Media. Despite the rapid adoption of OTT (over-the-top) streaming services and other changes in consumer viewing habits, the study found that at similar spend levels, television’s lift was consistently 7x paid search and 3x online for the industries studied.
Amazing brand experiences
Of course, a lot has happened since 2014. Today, Google data shows that 84 percent of smartphone and tablet users use those devices while watching TV, and they’re often searching for information that’s related to what they’re watching.
Whether it’s via addressable cable and satellite boxes or smart TVs, programmatic TV empowers brands to expand their omnichannel experience in a very meaningful and scalable way. It enables marketers to send different ads to different devices in real time based on what the user is watching. A teenager and their parent could be sitting side by side on a couch watching the same program and see completely different advertising appear on their personal devices based on real-time data signals captured by BDEX partners.
BDEX provides marketers the ability to target the smartphones of 180 million digital cable subscribers based on viewing habits. That could be the 1.5 million who watched NBC Sports Fishing programs in the prior four weeks or the 99 million who watched Pawn Stars on the History channel.
BDEX is committed to building the infrastructure marketers need to power human connectivity. Call (917) 410 6616 or email us at info@bdex.com today to learn how real-time targeting, our Data Exchange Platform, and other BDEX solutions can help you put the right messages in front of the right consumers at the right time.
