What To Do Before the Upfront

Addressability in digital which we have all taken for granted and in television which has been grudgingly slow in coming but is accelerating, could be severely hampered by escalation of privacy law enforcement. When I invented addressable commercials in 1979 and productized it in the 1990s, I warned that if it was used in an annoying fashion it would backfire. Unfortunately, it has been consistently misused at mass scale in digital and the wheels of governments grind slowly but eventually swing a big pendulum. Now that the EU has strongly penalized Meta for perceived forcing, all the other players who do not present conspicuous choice must begin doing so. More important than that, the benefits of what are called “personalized ads” must be made palpable to end users, they must feel the benefits. Next Century Media, my company which led the Addressable Advertising Coalition along with John Hendricks, made personalization palpable and valuable to end users by means of a very effective program recommender. This was set up to be something the viewer asked for and got immediate gratification from. Personalization served the public in that instance. Seeing the same ads over and over because of a gift one bought for someone else or a trip you’ve already taken is the current state of the business, and is antithetical to the goals of personalization, exactly the kind of caricature we had warned against.

Because addressability may go through a prohibition period this is the time to test the hell out of it and to learn as much as possible, with focus on approaches that the audience ought to appreciate and be grateful for. 

On November 16, the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) presented a webinar which showed that the average advanced audiences used in digital and advanced television tend to be extremely weak indicators of being the true targets claimed by the names given to those audiences. The typical such audience uses estimated demographics to predict product usage. The ARF study was more about the errors in the estimated demographics. The other part of the weakness of these so-called advanced audiences is that even if the demographics were accurate, demographics predict a very small part of product usage, most of product usage is predicted by psychological factors. In the most recent and most massive study ever done of this phenomenon, covering all 3830 brands measured by Simmons which have sample sizes of 1000+ users, demographics only explained 6% of brand usage. Psychological factors (600+ attitude questions and 265 RMT DriverTags) explained an additional 16%. 78% of brand usage was not attributable to any of the predictors. Meaning that if you want to reach specific types of product or brand users, you’d be better off renting direct mail lists of actual proven users, and ID graph matching them to IDs reachable by addressable media.

The most important thing you can be doing with addressable media is testing lists, and the lists to test ought to as much as possible be based not on demographic lookalikes but on harder evidence. RMT and Semasio base their lists on the actual online content consumption of an ID, semantically analyzed to find people who are motivated by the memes in your specific ad. Neustar showed that this roughly doubled the ROAS of demo-based lookalikes. This echoes the Simmons findings that psychological data has almost 3X the power of accurate demographics. Test lists in addressable including TV while you can. Use random holdout groups to read the incrementality of the list’s effects. Use the most ultimate KPI you can, either incremental sales or something as close to that as practical.

Content targeting may be where we are forced to go by privacy prohibition of addressable if it ever comes. At minimum we shall need to continue to straddle both as Google eventually carries out the promised third-party cookie deprecation. One thing to test is buying websites and apps whose content contains the underlying motivations that align with the underlying motivations in your ad. RMT and Semasio are offering to provide a list of websites and apps ranked by their motivational alignment with your ad. This should be included in your testing against addressable lists. The costs of content lists is one third that of ID lists.

As of January 11, 2023, if you are a subscriber to Nielsen ONE, you have a new tool that allows you to see the reach frequency you are getting in each cohort of the four-dimensional Venn diagram of linear, CTV, desktop and mobile. You ought to be pumping your cross-media campaigns through this system as fast as you can so as to establish learning to apply in the upfront.

RMT can rank program and rotation contexts in linear by their motivational amplification scores against your specific ads. Studying your brand’s ads’ motivations across recent time you can gauge the kinds of shows you will want to put in the corporate inventory bank for the next 18 months. This should be used to inform the buys you make in this upfront. The combination of reaching the right people and reaching them through contexts that amplify the effectiveness of your specific ads will increase ROAS on average +28% for the harder-data-based targets and +36% for the context-ad amplification.

The default option is to continue to accept rote repetition of methods used for a half century based on glib rhetoric and herd mentality. Risk of career indentation is at least equally great if you keep your mouth shut and your head down, so it’s better to stand up and speak out, and in your own life optimization you will definitely feel better to follow your best judgment of what is right, not what comes easily by going along with the herd.

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