As television addressable advertising incorporates more data and technology, media companies are stepping up with better delivery and measurement tools. For AMC Networks' Evan Adlman, Executive Vice President of Commercial Sales and Revenue Operations, his company's solution, Audience+, "is a data targeting and insights platform that is the culmination of all of the addressable development we've been doing over the last three years."
As Adlman explained, Audience+ "allows an advertiser, as well as our internal media planning teams, to understand who is watching, what are they watching, when are they watching and where are they watching." This platform brings together all of AMC Networks' addressable capabilities across all of their platforms, where, he noted, "the advertiser can take those insights, build a segment and target that audience across linear, VOD, FAST and, [as of] October, our ad-supported AMC+."
The ability of an advertiser to message across all available platforms through segmentations that are de-duplicated is currently offered to advertisers at three spots per hour -- but will soon expand to twelve. "We believe in 100% addressability across all of our inventory," Adlman said.
Essentially the system can "traffic a single campaign in the delivery system. It optimizes and delivers the advertisement across all available inventory based on where the audience is as well as the standard flight information -- all within 24 hours for every campaign that runs in real time," he added. The ease at which reporting can be done seamlessly is one big competitive advantage for Audience+ over competitors.
As far as data is concerned, Audience+ can accommodate AMC's first-party data and a range of third-party data including advertiser proprietary datasets. With AMC first-party data, "we have all of our viewership data, which is unique to AMC," he said. "We understand what shows are being watched, when they're being watched, on what platforms and so on. We have the ability for an advertiser to bring their data to create a segment and we work with our MVPDs, our distributor partnerships to match against their footprint. Once it matches, we curate the inventory and away we go. We also have the ability to create a segment for them."
This, according to Adlman, enables the system to "build something that is the closest to, or that exact audience profile of, what the advertiser is looking to reach."
In order to get the most value out of the system, Adlman advises advertisers to "let Audience+ do what it's supposed to do" and follow the segment that is targeted, even if that means going against an advertiser's gut feelings or previous buy compositions. It all goes back to whatever consumer target is more important. "You may think you need more prime, but in reality 70% of your delivery may be during daytime, and that's because that's where they are," he explained.
In terms of the future, the next step for Audience+ is "education for the market. We want to be bold with advertisers and show them that they can really buy media this way and make linear more efficient," he said.
Adlman understands that the viewer holds all the control. "Today it's the viewer that is more and more setting the appointments of where they're going to watch, when they're going to watch, what they're going to watch," he noted. Everyone has their own premiere viewing depending on when and where they decide to tune in. With viewership so fragmented today, the ability to seamlessly integrate all platforms with de-duplicated data to more efficiently match the desired target segmentation is "even more important to make sure you're getting the most reach that you want," he concluded. "Viewers are in a lot of different places [rather] than just one."
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