New Technology Allows For TV Ads to Target Specific Individuals, Families
New Technology Allows For TV Ads to Target Specific
Individuals, Families
February 17, 2014 9:07 AM
WASHINGTON — The days when political campaigns would try
to make inroads with demographic groups such as soccer moms or white
working-class voters are gone. Now, the operatives are targeting specific
individuals.
And, in some places, they can reach those individuals
directly through their televisions.
Welcome to Addressable TV, an emerging technology that
allows advertisers — Senate hopefuls and insurance companies alike — to pay
some broadcasters to pinpoint specific homes.
Advertisers have long bought ads knowing that only a
fraction of the audience was likely to respond to them. Allowing campaigns —
political or not — to finely hone their TV pitches to individuals could let
them more efficiently spend their advertising dollars.
“With a traditional TV buy you can end up paying for a
lot of eyeballs you don’t care about,” said Chauncey McLean, chief operating
officer of the Analytics Media Group, an ad and data firm.
“Addressable TV is a powerful tool for those that are
equipped to use it. If you know who you want to talk to and what you want to
say, you can be much more precise.”
Data geeks look at everything from voting histories to
demographics, magazine subscriptions to credit scores, all in the hopes of
identifying their target audience. The advertiser then hands over a list of
targets and, without the viewer necessarily realizing it, the ads pop on when
viewers sit down to watch a program if their broadcaster has the technology.
“This is the power of a 30-second television commercial
with the precision of a piece of direct mail targeted to the individual
household level,” said Paul Guyardo, chief revenue officer at DirecTV. “Never
before have advertisers had that level of precision when it came to a 30-second
commercial.”
The level of precision on televisions has long been a
dream for political campaigns, which are decided by relatively small groups of
voters. President Barack Obama’s campaign in 2012 experimented with it on a
small scale, but too few homes were in broadcasting systems equipped to handle
house-by-house decisions.
But earlier this year, DirecTV and Dish Network announced
a partnership that would allow political clients to reach into about 20 million
households by matching up customers’ identities with their satellite receiver,
much like a telephone number rings at a specific handset.
At the same time, NBC and parent company Comcast are
opening the door for advertisers to target specific households using
video-on-demand services in 20 million more households. The communications
giant is not yet ready to implement the targeting during live broadcasts,
though.
And GroupM, which handles about one-third of the world’s
ad buys, recently formed a division to handle such addressable advertising.
“We can send different commercials to different
households based on what we know about these people. Instead of one message per
state, it could be 12 messages per state,” said Michael Bologna, GroupM’s
director of emerging communications and president of the newly formed Modi
Media.
The broadcast companies are expected to be able to charge
more per viewer than for other ad orders, but in exchange advertisers get a
greater confidence that their message is finding its target. For instance,
Allstate has used such an approach to weed out homeowners when it is pitching
rental insurance on some broadcast systems.
Such specific political outreach has been possible for
years as strategists buy, build and scour detailed data on each home to
determine whether it is worth the time to knock on a door, to register a voter
or to phone them to remind them to cast a ballot.
In recent years, Democrats have built an advantage on
that data front.
The Republican National Committee has made catching up a
priority, saying it would focus on data this year and leave advertising to
outside groups. The RNC has announced one effort, branded Para Bellum Labs, to
help the party build its list of likely supporters for races up and down the
ballot.
The RNC has a lot of catching up to do. Obama’s two
presidential campaigns had a better grasp of the data.
Last year, Democrats built on those abilities in
Virginia’s gubernatorial contest. Strategists there used technology that
pointed to specific individuals for a knock on the door, a call on the phone or
an ad on their social networks.
It wasn’t immediately clear to those Virginia voters that
they were getting more attention than their neighbors. But behind the scenes,
Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s advisers were going after just a few
thousand voters. For instance, his strategists pinpointed 494,000 voters and
flooded them with Facebook messages criticizing McAuliffe’s rival, Ken
Cuccinelli.
“It’s a shift from identifying groups to identifying
people,” said Andrew Bleeker, president and CEO of Bully Pulpit Interactive,
the main firm advising McAuliffe on digital strategy.
But there are limits. Fewer than half of all households
have a cable box or satellite receiver that allows the broadcasters to splice
in ads on some televisions and not others.
The providers are limited to selling about two minutes of
addressable advertising per hour. An hour
long show on a broadcast network has about 14 minutes of commercials. Cable
varies, but they generally have about 17 minutes of commercials in a 60-minute
slot.
Building the list of targeted voters is tough and
sometimes costly.
And there’s no way of telling that the targeted viewer is
the one who sees the ad. All that can be known is that it made its way into the
households; federal laws prohibit the provider from telling the campaigns any
details about specific viewers or their individual habits.
Yet this option, reaching maturity in time for November’s
elections, could help campaigns and candidates more efficiently spend the
hundreds of millions of dollars that are already being raised.
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