Joe Kinchin, Partnerships Director at Finecast, looks at the targeting options available to Addressable TV advertisers. 

One of the most appealing aspects of Addressable TV is its ability to target audiences down to a postcode level in a non-personally identifiable, GDPR-compliant manner. In areas where a postcode might contain only a few households, we further aggregate the data into a postcode sector to ensure that the data remains non-personally identifiable. Moreover, advertisers can target multiple postcodes, with similar demographics, across the country, to deliver precision targeting at scale.

Finecast’s approach to addressability is based on multiple factors, including age, gender, life stage, lifestyle, interests and attitudes, along with actual product purchase behaviour. It is a full funnel approach that enables advertisers to effectively target the right brands and messaging towards the audiences that will be most receptive to them. Finecast has over 1,200 audience segments available enabling advertisers to reach consumers on linear, on-demand and live streamed services on connected TVs, other connected devices, set-top boxes and personal devices such as smartphones and tablets. So how does it work?

Content partners
Finecast works with a number of third-party data and content providers, enabling us to paint a rich and detailed picture of the make-up of households in the countries in which we operate. For example, from Nectar, we get Sainsbury’s first-party transactional customer data, providing a detailed view of the products and brands that Sainsbury’s customers buy every week. This enables advertisers to target known customers with up-selling and cross-selling offers, and also to target customers who buy competing brands, knowing that they have a propensity to buy the product category, and may be persuaded to switch brands.

Experian Marketing Services, a leading global information services company, gives us an expert view on consumer insights and profiles, enabling us to create a vast range of attributional and behavioural segmentations. We can then map those to postcodes and activate across them.

We also work closely with YouGov, which runs a survey panel where it asks consumers questions such as what they spend their money on, how often they go on holiday and what interests and hobbies they have. This provides a nationally representative, multidimensional profile of consumers, enabling us to understand their attitudes towards products, categories and brands, and build specific audiences to target.

Additionally, we can utilise some of content partners first party data to reach audiences based on the users’ interests and content viewing behaviour to align with our wider audiences’ strategies to build reach and limit wastage.

Finecast constantly reviews the data partners we work with, and adds new ones, to enable our advertisers to target audiences in the most relevant, efficient, and effective manner possible. Looking ahead, we plan to incorporate more deterministic intent and consideration data points, such as search and mobile data, into our offering, so advertisers can measure the impact of their ads on things such as brand perception, intent to purchase and sales. We are also now working with more data-driven creative to bring an added layer of addressability to our offering. Using dynamic, data-decisioned creative will enable us to show the most relevant content to subsets of the target audience, so if you imagine an ad for a range of electric vehicles, one segment might see an ad focused on a family model, while another sees a different creative, focused on a sports car, with different details on the dealership and deal within the relevant regions.

Location targeting
We can also target ads to people based on where they are. So, if an advertiser only wants to reach people at home, the ad would only be displayed on their TV, as we know that always lives at home. On the flip side, because we know where people are located, we can target them when they are out and about, through ads delivered to their smartphone, perhaps to target people who are within a certain distance of an event or of a store running a flash sale for a limited period.

BMW worked with Finecast to create a highly defined audience of “hybrid intenders”, refining its audience from a wide cohort of potential buyers within a young, ABC1 audience to include proximity to its dealerships. The subsequent campaign delivered a 31% lift in consideration and a 29% rise in purchase intent. In addition, 49% of those who saw the BMW ad searched for further information, and 10% visited a showroom. And with a lower budget than traditional TV.

In conclusion, audience targeting on Addressable TV is effective because of two factors: precision and scale. The precision comes from the data we can access from our various data and content partners, enabling us to create hundreds of audiences, characterised by very specific interests and behaviour traits. The scale comes from our ability to find these audiences in different postcode areas in the countries in which we operate. It is a winning combination, which attracts hundreds of new advertisers to our platform every year.

To find out more, visit www.finecast.com/en