• by Lizzy Hanna , Op-Ed Contributor, May 10, 2017

It’s equal parts interesting and obvious why BrightLine and Nielsen Marketing Cloud partnered to bring greater targeting, “personalization” and advanced measurement to marketers reaching users on connected TV platforms.

From a media planner’s perspective, to suddenly go from just demographic, geographic or contextual targeting to 60K+ personas to leverage on a device that gets put into the “traditional” media category isn’t bad most of the time.

It’s a step in the right direction in making ads more relevant for consumers, given the recent growth in smart TV adoption and OTT consumption. Not only has OTT streaming become more common, but the breadth of apps and content are affordable and the quality of the content couldn’t be better. (“Mozart in the Jungle,” anyone?)

But before we conclude that this partnership will solve the pervasive targeting, measurement and tracking issues across the connected TV landscape, we need to question how this solution will be implemented. We need to be able to provide real intelligence back to marketers in terms of what they can expect out of this new data-driven and measurable connected TV world.

This is a responsibility that can’t just live with Nielsen and BrightLine. We need to first understand the quality of this newly available data, then take a look at what is being promised marketers in terms of personalization, measurement, insights and ROI.

We’re taking a pretty big leap to say that 60K off-the-shelf segments equals personalization.

Just because you’re showing a minivan ad to someone who has been classified as a suburban soccer mom doesn’t mean her next-door neighbor who fits the same profile might find the ad relevant. Done correctly, personalization in today’s world actually means personalization – taking user data at a 1:1 level and tailoring a message accordingly.

This doesn’t mean that in all cases of digital marketing you have a real life version of “Minority Report” -- we’ve all been frustrated by retargeting ads that don’t stop even after we’ve purchased a product. But it does mean that recent and frequent actions that occur across multiple devices can yield a hyper-relevant message, based on a user’s interests, place in time, mind-set, precise location and previous searches.

It can also impact current behavior -- in addition to demographics and geography.

Things get interesting when we start to talk about what we can do with Nielsen’s data and content provider data – not to mention leveraging a marketer’s data for both targeting and advanced measurement. Content providers should be inspired to do this.

They (often) have access to their own user data source from multiple platforms, including connected TV, mobile, laptops and tablets. For some providers, they also have access to a marketer’s historical campaign and/or conversion data. Bringing together all of these data points is critical to ensuring that ads across connected TV are as personalized and effective as they can be.

Finally, it’s important to think about how marketers and agencies will evaluate this solution versus other forms of video advertising. Not only does Facebook now offer thousands of segments to tap into for targeting, but also you can now distribute long-form, short-form and live video formats in one place.

In return, you can optimize on the fly, based on metrics like engagement and completion rate. The greater potential feedback loop may include website visitation data, app download data and anything in between, down to purchase and ROI.

Can connected TV advertising today offer this Facebook-level of feedback? Some, but not all.

Content providers have another chance to enhance their offering. If, for one example, Hulu would combine the Nielsen data with its own user data, we could unlock tracking and attribution that would tie users across multiple platforms and show action taken on other platforms after exposure to a connected TV ad.

Let’s be honest. What are the odds that someone watching a connected TV ad will buy a pair of shoes from that device directly versus someone seeing the ad searching on their phone and then purchasing the next day on a desktop?

It’s up to the content providers to start to think more like this, and then they – as well as marketers – will see even greater returns.