As viewers consume content across an increasingly varied set of platforms, the issue of metrics and measurement looms large for multi-screen TV buyers. The old timey use of gross ratings points (GRPs) is no longer accurate or comparable across platforms. As a result, some opportunities are getting missed and miscalculated along the way.
That's according to John Mangano, DeepIntent's Senior Vice President of Analytics. "Buying and measurement from the 1950s to now hasn't really changed," he said. "[GRPs were] something that was fine for many decades, but today [they] feel very prehistoric."
The GRP is based on reach and frequency. In other words, GRPs are calculated as the percentage of a specific demo that an ad reaches, multiplied by the number of times they see the ad in a certain campaign. And in the past, marketers didn't have the ability to go much further with metrics than that. That's far from ideal, because a campaign can have "massive frequency and reach very few people or you can reach a lot of people and have very low frequency," Mangano explained.
Today, with digital media, one-to-one targeting is the norm. And measurement should reflect that. It's critical that marketers have the ability to be very specific about how they identify viewers and aggregate them, beyond the usual demographics, Mangano asserted. This can include very specific buying inclinations and motivations.
"You need to get to the next level, which is a profile of who you're reaching so you know you're reaching the right targets," he added.
DeepIntent built a demand side platform (DSP) purposefully for the health sector, where the value and importance of privacy-safe one-to-one targeting is paramount. "If we're reaching a lot of men, and [the message pertains to] a health condition that only affects women, it's not good," Mangano noted. "Because we're a DSP, the foundation of what we do is retargeting one-to-one. The DSP is the backbone of how the Internet serves ads." DeepIntent not only allows marketers to target but also to quantify very specifically what audiences their ads are reaching.
With CTV, "television is now moving into a platform that has the kind of accuracy that digital ads have had for years," he explained.
There's another plus: DeepIntent's research has found that today's TV viewers have no idea whether they're watching CTV or regular TV, as discussed in this recent DeepIntent story. From the average person's perspective, it's all the same. What's more, most viewers are okay with ads, understanding that they are the foundation of TV content funding. In fact, DeepIntent's research shows that themajority of its survey respondents are open to watching ads or having ads be part of their viewing experience if they reduce the cost of a streaming subscription.
Viewers also don't need to be worried about privacy concerns because that's very important to DeepIntent. "There are two levels of privacy," Mangano said. "One is legal, which is a top priority of ours. The other is ethical." Sometimes an ad can adhere to legal standards of privacy but ethically it may be problematic. This is especially true in healthcare advertising.
"We never use health information for one-to-one," he continued. "We build models that help us find people more likely [to have a certain condition], but the reality of it is not based off of anyone's individual health information."
The data from the served ads is aggregated and anonymized, which gives DeepIntent the ability to measure the rate at which a marketer reaches the right patient audiences, and it can measure how many people took specific actions. But the DeepIntent platform never determines which people were reached, or who acted in the way that impacts the marketer.
DeepIntent is also able to parse how frequently it reaches individuals and on what devices -- a TV set, laptop or desktop, for example. The data is placed in an analytics engine, which delineates specifically what different combinations of exposures drove action. What's more, DeepIntent's client base includes physicians, and its system can analyze when viewers who saw an ad went to see a certain doctor.
"We are typically seeing an increase in the ability to find the right patients using CTV over linear TV, as well as seeing higher rates of treatment," Mangano explained. "Because you're impacting more people for every marketing dollar spent, that ultimately means healthier people, living longer happier lives."
The past is not necessarily prologue for the future of pharma advertising. "When I first started in the health analytics industry 15 years ago, I spent a lot of my time trying to help pharma understand the Internet space and market it," he said. "A lot has changed in terms of more advanced marketing, and the industry has changed, too. There is a lot more focus on privacy and other laws."
Since the pandemic, telemedicine has become far more common. And at the same time, it's caused some people to delay treatments. So, the call for better and more individualized treatments has never been greater.
"The pharma industry has realized that there are many ways to reach both doctors and patients [through digital media], and they're leveraging that more than ever," Mangano concluded. "DeepIntent's ability to deliver the messages, whether to patients or doctors, creates efficiencies that weren't there five years ago."
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