• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, March 6, 2020

It’s no secret that addressable is still working on challenges including creating unified measurement and attribution standards, enabling scale, and opening up national inventory.

Industry groups including Project OAR and On Addressability are focused on tackling these issues.

But in the meantime, some players are pushing ahead with innovative implementations.

Case in point: Cadillac’s work with Dentsu Aegis Network. The team used the agency’s nationwide database and Cadillac’s first-party data to identify attributes indicating the highest propensity to be a future purchaser of a Cadillac.

After running the results against the customer base, the brand emerged with 10 million (anonymized) prospects, with physical addresses, reported Doug Ray, chairman of media and U.S. head of media at Dentsu Aegis, during VAB’s Leadership Summit.

When this “future owners” propensity file was run against the Polk model for premium SUVs, it was found that these consumers were 19 times more likely to buy a Cadillac than any other luxury vehicle in the future — a far cry from relying on a traditional luxury demo like consumers 25 to 54 with ‘X’ income.

“We found our customer — not just 'a luxury SUV’ customer,” Ray stressed.

“So now, we want to go out and find those 10 million prospects addressably,” and with the ability to manage frequency, he said. “But we also want to make sure that we use the right creative. So we’ve now met with four different companies to bring together creative, media and technology” to help fashion and implement a “fundamentally different” marketing model for Cadillac.

This effort is part of the Escalade’s new marketing initiative, centered on a “Make Your Way” manifesto, under new Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady. It debuted in three spots during this year’s Academy Awards, including an in-broadcast, pre-show integration. (One spot was from Leo Burnett Detroit in collaboration with Dentsu Aegis’s Carat and two were from AOR Leo Burnett Detroit.)

“For brand building, we need to connect people to the purpose of the brand through cultural moments like the Academy Awards,” Ray continued. “But we also need to find those 10 million high-propensity customers in the most targeted ways and deliver the appropriate creative.”

The same process has now been used to create propensity models for Buick and Chevy, so “now we want to go out and reach those customers with different ads,” he added.

“Having this audience approach allows us to not only buy linear differently; now we have a segment that we can bring to addressable,” Grady recently confirmed to AdExchanger. “Now, instead of trying to do modeling, we go to our addressable partners and say, ‘Here’s our audience. This is what we want to activate’… I don’t need look-alike models, I don’t need your data. Here’s my audience. How are you going to help increase reach and frequency? And how can you help me show up differently?’”

Another example: Through new partnerships with ad-tech companies, MVPDs and TV set manufacturers, Discovery will soon be able to deliver different ads for the same brand to sizable audience groups within an addressable universe, Jon Steinlauf, Discovery’s chief U.S. advertising sales officer, reported during the VAB event.

Steinlauf used a hypothetical example in which an automotive brand decides to advertise on a Discovery network series in this year's first quarter.  

About 40 million of the network’s 90 million homes are addressable-enabled, and if the program has a 2 household rating, that means 800,000 homes will be watching, he said. The brand can opt to “carve those homes into four buckets of 200,000 each, and we can distribute four different ads — one to each bucket,” Steinlauf said. “This is what I would call ‘copy splits.’”

The remaining, non-addressable homes that are viewing the show might see a backdrop ad from the same brand. “Or maybe we might go to a direct response advertiser and say, ‘You can have the non-addressables at whatever cost-per-unit we sell,” he added. “This is coming because of the partnerships we’ve struck in the past six months.”

On the ad-tech front, Ampersand is conducting addressable campaign tests with brands, and seeing the scale that's possible increase significantly about every six months, reported another panelist, Nicolle Pangis, CEO of Ampersand.

Ampersand has set-top box data on 38 million of 80 million households across 120 cable networks. “We take that data and overlay every national buy that a brand has done, so we can see over-exposure, under-exposure and no exposure,” she said.

“They continue to buy national, but now they can see where they’re [missing audience] or over-exposed. Once they have that data, they can act on it in the next campaign. And then do that again and again, so they’re continuously refining.”

While it's still early days, this, she concluded, demonstrates “the promise of all this.”