Last week, MediaVillage had an opportunity to sit down with Cadent's Tony Yi, Executive Vice President of Business Development and General Manager of Aperture Platform's Direct Sales business. Yi is a 20-year industry veteran with deep experience in management consulting, enterprise software technology and global media. His mission? To offer an easy-to-execute, end-to-end solution that maximizes choice, targetability, efficiency and performance for every marketer's campaign.
Cadent is today the largest independent platform for advanced TV advertising. Its tools and partnerships sit agnostically at the center of the media planning and buying process, aligning user-defined content, data options and measurement partners to deliver a customizable experience with minimal friction. The result maximizes impact through minimal ad tax, reduced waste and increased effectiveness of ad dollars.
"The adtech ecosystem is incredibly complex, with many players waiting in the wings, trying to prove how deep they are into the problems but not necessarily achieving their marketing goals," explained Yi. "Cadent's solutions aim to resolve this by providing clients a broad marketplace where they can choose data providers and activate ads in hundreds of destinations using both first and third-party data."
Over the last twelve months, the platform has welcomed over 20 audience data partners and 10 measurement partners, bringing the full Aperture ecosystem to 65 integrated deployment partners.
The company's legacy and strength in television -- both national and local -- make it a highly sought-after marketing partner. With automated tools that send orders to over 1000 broadcasters, 90 cable networks and 100 million households for 1-to-1, deterministic, household-level targeting across CTV and FAST players, Cadent was the first company of its kind to offer both linear and digital advertising options, with all the data required to build effective advertising strategies.
"There is a lot of value and trust in that local consumer relationship with the media," Yi noted. From a marketplace perspective, the Cadent platform gives local broadcast and cable companies a real ability to compete with strong data on a national level -- data that not only makes sense but is easily comparable to other media investments.
How do they do it? "It all starts with our ability to identify the household," Yi said. "We've been very video-focused from the onset. Our ability to identify the household and all the devices in the household -- because consumption of TV isn't just in the living room anymore -- is critical. Our platform is highly accurate with high match rates across the household consumer base allowing us to offer exceptional planning capabilities, media activation capabilities and, most importantly, measurement capabilities."
In fact, last year, the company reported that its Aperture Viewer Graph delivers over a 90% average match rate for audience segments and houses over four billion match keys across zip codes, emails, IP addresses and more. At just under 15 minutes to onboard and match a file, Aperture Viewer Graph is one of the industry's quickest to securely onboard first-party data.
With the TV landscape becoming more fragmented and complex, connecting with audiences across multiple screens and devices is an increasingly difficult challenge for advertisers spending on the medium. The privacy-compliant Aperture Viewer Graph provides the foundational technology for unifying audiences across the TV ecosystem and empowers advertisers to precisely target their specific high-value audiences as well as to measure results in terms of business outcomes using any third-party partner of choice.
Yi points out that fragmentation is not just about TV consumption, though. It's also about supply. "There are so many players in the adtech ecosystem taking their toll on the marketer's dollar today," he said. "Supply-path optimization is the impetus behind Cadent's products that stitch together all the pieces within the workflow and activation system to minimize ad tax."
One aspect of measurement Yi believes is becoming more important is proof of performance. He defines it as evidence that a specific campaign is delivering incremental value by efficiently spending dollars to move consumer behavior. Proving incrementality -– whether it's incremental reach, sales lift, or other business outcomes -– is a much-needed step in winning the trust of clients. While similar to return on ad spend (ROAS), Yi explained that true proof of performance is even more precise, accounting for deeper campaign insights. Armed with plenty of case studies, Cadent is confident they can demonstrate a magnitude of success worth leaning into.
Last week Cadent announced an extended partnership with Catalina, establishing Cadent as Catalina's preferred platform for executing linear, addressable and connected TV (CTV) ad campaigns for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, and Catalina as Cadent's preferred CPG data, audience and measurement provider. The company reported that their three-year alliance to-date (formed originally in 2020) has experienced 900% year-over-year growth and partnership campaigns drove an average sales lift of 25 percent. Alliances such as these enhance Cadent's ability to assist advertisers in reaching more precise audiences across screens and measure direct sales impact on in-store sales lift from exposed homes.
Feeling like the future is complex? You bet. And frankly, it needs to be. Insights and direction don't come easy with the myriad options, devices and contexts out there to reach consumers. The layered cake of data and adtech just adds to the frustration. But the best cakes come with high quality ingredients and a simple way to consume them. Such is Cadent's goal, offering high quality options for marketing professionals with an "easy button" to get the job done.
Learn more about Cadent Aperture Platform
The Aperture Platform enables the planning, building, activation and measurement of audiences across the converged TV ecosystem including broadcast, cable, and CTV. Aperture Platform is powered by our proprietary Viewer Graph. This single identity spine connects first- and third-party data via IP-to-household mapping technology. With 65+ data partners, more than 70,000 data segments, and a 90%+ average match rate, Aperture provides unparalleled access to strategic audiences. For publishers, Aperture streamlines workflows helping to sell, optimize, and monetize successful ad campaigns. Aperture is the only solution that simplifies the buying and selling of converged TV advertising. For more information, visit https://cadent.tv/platform/.
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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.