ITN Taps Nielsen Catalina Data For Ad Sales

With advertisers demanding more insight into audiences and ad impacts, media agencies and broadcasters alike are turning to new sources of data on audience purchase decisions to provide more precise targeting capabilities and measurement.

In the latest such deal, ITN Networks, which aggregates TV audiences to create customized national “networks” for advertisers, has struck a deal with Nielsen Catalina Solutions, giving it access to NCS’ database of consumer purchase behavior to help advertisers reach their desired audiences.

ITN will incorporate NCS consumer purchase data for CPG, pharma and OTC products into its proprietary AdVantage platform, an automated system that allows advertisers to plan, execute and track performance of geographically targeted TV and online ad buys.

Altogether ITN has relationships with over 800 local broadcast stations, satellite TV providers and regional and local cable channels, and these relationships extend to their Web sites, enabling cross-channel campaigns.

As part of the deal, NCS’ measurement of ITN’s aggregated TV networks will be reported in NCS’ AdVantics On Demand service, which enables advertising clients and agencies to identify audience segments most likely to purchase their goods and target them across networks, dayparts, genres, and programs.

The AdVantics On Demand data set covers around 664,000 U.S. households, drawn from 70 million frequent shopper households tracked by Catalina and 2.7 million TV viewing households measured by Nielsen.

According to the companies the integration of NCS data will bring ITN closer to its goal of offering true programmatic TV ad sales. ITN CEO Tim Connors stated: “The ITN AdVantage platform will be able to ingest all big data sources and first-party data sets, combine them with real-time and near-time data, and make them actionable to identify, plan, buy, measure, optimize and steward schedules.”

As noted, NCS has struck a number of deals in recent months linking TV ad buys to consumer purchase behavior.

In October, it announced a deal with Crossix Solutions, which specializes in healthcare marketing analytics, to help pharmaceutical marketers craft more targeted TV ad campaigns. In September, Starcom MediaVest Group struck a deal to integrate NCS data into its TV planning and buying system. Also, Simulmedia struck a deal to license NCS data to help CPG marketers target their TV advertising buys based on actual consumer product purchasing data.

1 comment about "ITN Taps Nielsen Catalina Data For Ad Sales".
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  1. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, February 26, 2015 at 5:16 p.m.

    It should be pointed out that the basis for the indexing, as I understand it, is the set usage ratings obtained from set top boxes, not actual viewing data. So, anybody in the home might be viewing, not necessarily the advertiser's human target. These set top box ratings are then interfaced, in some manner, with product purchase information from some of the same homes and , finally, the resulting indices, which define how "valuable' a home is to the marketer, are merged with Nielsen's peoplemeter findings, presumably taken down to the viewer level. Assuming that I got that correctly---and please feel free to clarify, guys----- the question I'd like to pose is how do you apply the household set usage data to the reported peoplemeter "viewing information? For example, if a TV show comes up with an index of 110 in terms of product usage ---based on set top box set usage data----is this 110 index then applied directly to the peoplemeter's women aged 18-49 ratings for the same show, or is some adjustment made to account for the fact that said women may not have been the ones watching in the set top box homes that tuned in---at least not to the extent of a 100% correlation, or "fit"?

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