Jes Santoro would like to introduce you to someone who can instantly demonstrate the value of exploring more sophisticated targeting in TV buying.
She’s a 35-year-old woman, someone who is often considered a highly covetable target customer for brands across multiple categories. The problem is that it’s not necessarily that easy to know more about her. Is she a stay-at-home parent, busy with homeschool and looking for healthy meals for her family? Or is she a high-flying lawyer who prefers the single life and spends time off with her friends?
As the SVP, Advanced TV and Video at New York-based Cadent, Santoro is trying to help brands better understand the nuances in these archetypal marketing personas. It means explaining how data aggregations and other technologies can not only help find more targeted audiences, but provide a more granular look at how segments within an audience are different.
“Changing the way marketers buy, plan, execute and measure TV investments is only challenging because so much of it is still rooted in this muscle memory, this legacy thinking,” he said. “The thing is, the ability to shift away from demo-based buying is not this pipe dream that we were talking about years ago. It’s here and available today.”
Responding To Changing Viewing Habits
Valuing consumers as individuals is not only an accurate way to determine a marketing investment, Santoro argues, but an essential best practice given the way viewing habits are changing.
“Maybe a decade ago when the choice and control we have today didn’t exist, you can get away with (demo-based advertising), because there was a consolidation of options to explore,” he said. “But now with radically increased amounts of choices for consumers, things are more diluted. There’s an opportunity now for consumers to find niche environments based on their interests, and the ads they see should reflect that.”
This not only includes what’s shown on linear TV but all ad-supported video, Santoro said. He described the former as a way to “bark out that broad message,” then use CTV and OTT to introduce different levels of personalization.
Cadent empowers marketers in this effort with a platform designed to offer precision in TV ad buying at scale, using data-driven execution to balance the reach of a national TV spot with the incremental reach that comes through targeting based on specific customer attributes.
The Power Of An Audience Graph
This mission informed the decision by Cadent in January 2020 to acquire 4INFO, whose data activation platform incorporates patented audience graph technology that resolves multiple TV devices back to a household.
The deal means Cadent now offers an even greater toolset to support brands as the industry moves into a cookieless world, while also separating what Santoro called the “bigger spender” customers from the “come and go-ers” who may be less valuable to a brand.
“It’s important to understand how a household is behaving and all the mechanisms by which they’re consuming content,” he explained. “It allows the advertiser to communicate with certainty into that household.”
Although the promise of vaccines may mean consumers are less housebound than they were through most of 2020, Santoro said the pandemic has showcased which medium offers the biggest potential for immersive experiences and habit formation.
“I still would maintain the best market for what constitutes those content events is television, because of the immediacy of an audience,” he said, adding that brands are looking for ways to recover after a particularly chaotic period.
“The call for greater fluidity and flexibility is something we’re hearing loud and clear from advertisers. They want the ability to move investments across supply and make flighting adjustments, and we’re going to be partners in this journey.”
