Ad Network Casale Taps Nielsen For Offline Data

Joe-Casale

Casale Media plans to reveal Monday that it has integrated Nielsen offline data through Nielsen PRIZM Digital to provide advertisers with audience segmentation for online ad targeting. The company now reaches audiences based on lifestyle, financial and technology preferences to serve nearly 70% of the U.S. online audience through roughly 3,000 monitored short-tail publishers.

The technology helps buyers and planners understand offline segments. It translates these to online audiences through conversions by allowing them to reach them in the same workflow system. Marketers don't need to log into a separate Nielsen system to get the data and integrate it with media buys on their network.

In the ad-serving space, companies need to know what they're doing. Casale Media, built on data and real-time processing of information, originates in test, measurement and analysis to support data automation for scientific instrumentation by using early versions of microcomputers, explains Casale Media President and CEO Joe Casale. "Actually, Casale Media is a project, the first one we put our name on," he explains. "We know the Internet inside, out and backwards. We're a technology company first."

As one of the first companies on the Web to move toward http in the early 1990s, most of the company's work in computing has been in real-time processing. The first version of the ad network, which launched in 2003, forms the company's core technology. It uses something called automated creative optimization, which reviews all ads given to the network and decides in real time where and when to serve them.

The ad network platform creates a heat map in real-time, optimizing the message of the ad's creative before it is served. It relies on human behavior, not traditional behavioral targeting, similar to the process of walking past a magazine stand and something in the cover design causes the consumer to stop and reach out to pick up the magazine.

Casale says behavioral targeting, aimed at reducing media waste, failed at the job. "It's not as simple as one might think, but we know exactly the type of consumers who see the ads, and we do it with help from Nielsen's purchase data," he says.

Audience segments identify like-minded individuals in communities who live in specific households who bought Kellogg Corn Flakes, for example, allowing the network to target online ads by matching IP addresses and cookies data stored in browsers. Through cookies the households get labeled such as "American Classic" with specific titles.

Nielsen's offline data sets store customer information, lumping households into categories. If consumers in those households navigate the Web and make a purchase on an ecommerce site that partners with Nielsen, a cookie dropped in the browser would identify the audience segment and serve up an online advertisement.

Advertisers can choose to target a handful of specific consumers in predetermined audience segments and skip the remainder in an effort to eliminate potential media waste. The idea is to serve less ad impressions with better results. Casale believes relying on more data to target earlier in the process can eliminate "waste."

At Casale Media, offline data guides online targeting. In time, data and technology will reduce the amount of ads required to improve conversions. But this is just the tip of the iceberg to reduce media waste. The company plans to move into online video, followed by mobile.

Marketers have viewed video campaigns on television for delivering messages. For the past five to six years there have been attempts to repurpose online the video in television ads. But it has been too costly. Casale plans to produce these ads for less.

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