• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, March 3, 2022

A trio of media industry veterans has launched datafuelX, which offers products for forecasting and optimization of ad audiences and campaign delivery outcomes. The firm will offer versions of the tools for media planners, buyers and sellers.  

The founders are: Jay Amato, president, who is the former general manager of OpenAP; Howard Shimmel, head of strategy and former Chief Research Officer at Turner Broadcasting, and Spencer Lambert, manager product and partnership success who previously was a media strategist at Horizon Media.

Michael Strober, founder and president of The Topwater Advisory Group Inc. and Dan Aversano, senior vice president, data, analytics and advanced advertising for Univision Communications, along with Shimmel serve as Directors for datafuelX.

One of the company’s initial products is a reach and frequency tool called precisionX. It’s a reach and frequency tool that creates models of linear audiences, which can be used to converge traditionally siloed channels of linear, addressable and digital. It’s touted as “providing a more holistic view of the consumer.” 

The company said that Univision Communications, and media agency Mediahub in partnership with EDO Inc. are the first clients to use precisionX. The companies are leveraging proprietary consumer behavior data for prediction of engagement performance of advertiser campaigns across Univision’s linear networks. 

A second tool at launch is called outcomeX, a predictive analytics modeling tool that takes aggregated outcome data sets and tethers them to audience compositions across the linear TV landscape to build estimates of outcome behavior by selling rotation for specific publishers. The company said this would allow publishers and marketers to construct campaigns focused on outcomes driven by optimized schedules.

“The alternative currency wars will bring far better datasets to the TV and cross-platform world than we’ve had before,” says Shimmel. “At the same time, the challenges that publishers face with media selling and that agencies face with effective planning and buying are growing.”

Shimmel added that the company’s tools are “reusable decision support models that can be implemented easily and rapidly and that help buyers and sellers engineer the outcomes they want. These support models will be crucial as the complexity of the media ecosystem grows.”