Data-driven linear (DDL) is a more advanced, audience-based way of buying TV, combining the precision of digital data sets and the scale of TV. With DDL, advertisers define audiences with greater specificity using interest, behavioral, and purchase data to better reflect their marketing target. Granular audience segmentation, coupled with optimized TV plans generated by media owners, enables advertisers to deliver messages to consumers that will be more receptive, which increases campaign effectiveness. DDL campaigns that are optimized against advanced targets deliver on average 30% more audience-targeted impressions compared to age and gender targeted campaigns and improved ROI.¹

Despite the benefits of data-driven linear, many advertisers still use outdated age and gender targeting. This is perhaps related to the misconception that buying more targeted audiences at scale on linear TV is too complex and time-consuming. Over 40% of advertisers cited the effort required as a barrier to adopting data-driven linear.²

However, thanks to advancements in data and technology, buying data-driven linear is easier than ever before. Ad tech platforms offer the toolset and scaled marketplace access advertisers need to plan, execute and measure national TV investments against advanced audiences.

Technology simplifies audience activation

Complexities with defining and activating advanced audiences are becoming a thing of the past. Technology platforms have simplified the activation of advanced data for TV by providing standardized workflows for advertisers to build consistent audiences across media owners with third-party or matched first-party data sets. Standardization guarantees that audiences are sufficiently sized and eliminates inconsistencies that emerged when media owners separately defined the target audience. With this development, buyers now have visibility into unique reach and universe estimates across their entire DDL campaign.

There’s an abundance of data for advertisers to define TV audiences with greater precision. Through partnerships and a data-agnostic framework, ad tech platforms provide access to a range of data sets to help advertisers reach their target audience and achieve business KPIs. Advertisers can choose pre-defined segments, such as “small business owners,” or combine multiple attributes to build their target audience. To leverage first-party data, safe-haven partnerships enable fast and efficient audience matching to TV viewership data. Audiences can be saved and reused in future campaigns, further improving operational efficiency.

Ad tech platforms provide a holistic view of performance across sellers

In the past, individual media buys across media owners prevented unified campaign management and measurement, presenting advertisers with a fragmented view of their campaign. Each buy had to be managed and analyzed in silos with each media owner proposal containing different metrics. Reach and frequency had to be unified manually, taking into account different methodologies across media owners.

The DDL marketplace has evolved with ad tech platforms now able to provide access to a scaled data-driven linear marketplace, enabling advertisers to transact with multiple media owners, eradicating the operational inefficiencies that existed from executing campaigns separately. Through these platforms, buyers can activate advanced audiences, submit RFPs across multiple media owners and review holistic standardized campaign proposals and reporting that include impressions, CPMs, indexes and total deduplicated reach.

Xandr’s Invest TV platform empowers advertisers to activate consistent audiences and achieve unified reach across today’s biggest media owners. Invest TV was designed to be a self-serve platform, but not all buyers want to be 100% self-service. Invest TV’s Concierge service is a flexible service approach that enables buyers to interact with the platform in a way that works best for them.  Buyers can work with our Customer Success team on any aspect of the buying process they want assistance: defining advanced audiences and creating their audience library, setting up RFPs, and requesting revisions.

Technology has enabled more streamlined data-driven linear buying at scale by providing the functionality needed to make planning, transacting and measuring campaigns much easier. By partnering with the right experts and leveraging the right solution, advertisers can bypass perceived obstacles to adoption and capitalize on the full potential of data-driven linear.

Sources:

1. Xandr Internal Data
2. Xandr Global Relevance Report