NYI's Betsy Rella on the Value of Audience-Based Marketing

In the recent past, audience-based marketing has been viewed as a customized opportunity for advertisers. For Rella, however, audience-based marketing, "is table stakes at this point. Marketers and agencies are thinking more strategically about how to use data to help drive revenue. This approach of targeting specific audiences helps to eliminate waste, increase efficiency and focus on the consumers that help drive sales."

Whether or not audience-based targeting is appropriate depends on a campaign's goal. "You don't necessarily need to target a certain audience if you are at the beginning of your product cycle," she said. "But if you are further down the line, and you are honing in on a specific group, then you are talking about audience-based targeting. You can do that with linear, with addressable and with digital/OTT [over the top], as well."

Audience-Based Marketing Campaigns in Action

NYI offers an expansive inventory selection from top distributors. "We rep inventory for Altice, Comcast, Charter, Direct, Dish, RCN, Blueridge, Frontier and Verizon in the New York market," she noted. "For digital, it is primarily Altice, Comcast and Charter -- although we have other extension partners, as well."

With the goal of measuring how a campaign performed across all screens, impressions appear to be the one benchmark metric that enables buyers and sellers to link all platforms and data sources together to get a holistic view of campaign performance. "Beyond impressions, we are also able to link datasets and measure attribution based on the exposed/unexposed audiences and the outcome measures -- so we can determine which audience segments drove more sales, website visits, store location visits, etc.," Rella explained.

The proof of the value of audience-based marketing is in the deliverables. NYI has conducted campaigns across several sales categories, which yielded valuable insights. "A recent example was an auto advertiser that has done multiple campaigns with us and always asks for an attribution analysis as well," Rella said. "The analysis revealed that targeted households exposed to both TV and digital delivered a higher conversion rate versus each element on its own, and that digital increased the targeted reach by ten percentage points. Thus, layering digital onto linear provided a valuable reach extension and produced an overall ROI of more than $10."

Future Plans

There are a number of initiatives that NYI is working on for the future including real-time reporting, increased frequency of reporting throughout the campaign and an enhanced dashboard. "We're moving more towards the automation of our reporting as quickly as we can," Rella stated. "We hear from the clients that the campaign runs, and then there is the attribution analysis which can take several weeks, depending on the agreed-upon attribution period. They can't wait. So, we are trying to speed up that process. We are also trying to measure reach and frequency for all digital campaigns across our multiple partners.

"As far as the future is concerned, a few years from now I think everything that we're working on will be in a more advanced state," she continued. "We are looking to continue our consultative process with clients and provide them with the detailed and actionable information they need to drive their business forward and, ultimately, drive sales."

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