• by Jennifer Pelino , April 20, 2016

Balancing the P&L for a marketer is a system of checks and balances; with the biggest line item for consumer product brands being its working media. Marketers need to take every opportunity to ensure optimization of their programs to gain the maximum return on their investment. Breaking down the components of any advertising buy with focus on the target audience is the best way to drive efficiency. Optimizing media plans and reducing waste by a few percentage points allows for gains as long as the benefits are not cancelled out by a proportionate increase in media costs. 

It’s easy for marketers to become formulaic, to plan and go to market where we barely notice that we are just working off similar grandfathered plans that make only incremental changes. How do we break out of this pattern and gain more clarity around what can really drive value?

Clarity depends on comparison, and a shock of the unfamiliar is sometimes necessary to change a systematic state. We need to wade through massive amounts of data; mining through the relevance is difficult.

Rather than making incremental adjustments to plans to save dollars, brands need to embrace the fact that premium inventory leads to incremental scale and increased performance. To drive real business outcomes and increase the probability of maximizing ROI from collective marketing efforts, strategic maneuvers must be employed to reach a precise audience. Programmatic, purchase-based targeting and addressable media are three approaches to consider when the objective is to build premium audiences: 

Programmatic

Programmatic is a scalable and efficient tool that can be employed to increase the odds of reaching a target audience across a number of consumer groups that have not been exposed previously to your message. With its machine learning capabilities, programmatic eliminates a good portion of manual intervention; removing a layer of cost to increase the value. 

Purchase-Based Targeting

Demographic, geographic, contextual targeting and purchase proxies do not guarantee that your content will reach your exact target. Purchase-based targeting has granularity & proven benefits for the advertiser like twice-improved lift and four times greater ROI than non-purchase-based targeting campaigns. Many marketers think they have incorporated this data into the data stack, but you could be getting shortchanged if, for example 80% of the audience is modeled. The higher the verified audience, the better the quality for precision. 

Addressable Media 

Addressable media combines the scale and mass accessibility of TV along with the personalization digital can offer. Since addressable TV is about the person and not the program, the power of the data can be harnessed and merged with a brand’s target objectives. Brands can run tests with the combination of purchase-based targeting and addressable TV to increase their overall media efficiency. 

While marketplace trends are moving more towards addressable, the scale available is limited on the TV front. There are clear benefits of reaching those precise audiences in the short term but they are also enjoying the longer term effects. A brand’s marketing efforts will be stronger, as the accuracy of the data and the personalized delivery provide loyalty program comparable longevity. 

The lasting effects of the focused message to a qualified audience are significant. Brands that have shown an uplift from 5% to 13% on a campaign are also seeing a lasting benefit in a post 26 week period of between a 5.5% to 9.6% uplift to the brand on a dollar per household spend vs. those that were not exposed to a campaign. 

Brands that are best positioned to take advantage of these results are new brands or a brand with news to share if they have a specific category or consumer-focused segment that needs to quickly maximize its potential. Brands that also have a very specific audience to target or a semi-niche product will reap these benefits. Categories and brands that can share in these short and longer term benefits include Pet, Condiments, Packaged Meats, Beauty, Baby, Seasonal Goods (e.g. Cold & Flu) and Frozen Foods, Specialty Packaged Goods. 

With the increased scrutiny on margins and budgets and a need for hitting the right levers to increase the brands bottom line, the available personalized audience tools allow for a more forward thinking approach and a higher level of clarity that positively impacts the bottom line.