• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 6, 2015

Data science tech company Civis Analytics, founded by the chief analytics officer from Obama's 2012 campaign with backing from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, began rolling out a media optimizer Tuesday.

Company founders claim it will reinvent TV ad planning.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on TV media, but the underlying science that agencies use to plan their buys hasn't changed since the 'Mad Men' era of the 1960s.

For the most part, it's still done through small market research datasets, focus groups, demographic segments and gut.

The goal aims to narrow mass communication messages from targeting the many to the few consumers expected to become interested in the product and make a purchase. Increasingly, companies store massive amounts of data to increase personalized messages, but they don't have the methods, personnel and tools to do it, per Civis CEO Dan Wagner. 

It took the group two years for Wagner and crew to rewrite the original version used in politics for other markets. Now, Civis Media Optimizer lets marketers build complicated analytics, merge company databases and build predictive models for television media buys in a variety of markets.

The platform ingests a list of individual-audience targets, combines it with consumer viewing data sets from respondent panels and set-top boxes, and the machine learns algorithms that help marketers pick the exact TV inventory for their budget.

The platform can also compliment search campaigns.

Peter Bouchard, Civis director of media science, says the platform and television can also drive search campaigns. "The entire movie industry can be predicted based on search volume and how do you increase search volume, you advertise to the correct people," he says. "Our hope, in this particular case, if a movie's going to be released you can increase the search volume by a certain percentage."

Wagner says search introduces a "natural accountability," an intermediate marketing step that marketers can use to validate how well the message resonates with consumers.

The next step will allow brands to take the inferences from the television media buys and use them to bridge the gap to digital media, such as video and display.