Standardised TV behavioural-targeting attributes can align with digital and help facilitate cross-media campaigning

Aside from accurate measurement of advertising effectiveness, one of the biggest aspirations for Advertisers – and their agencies – is to be able to design and deploy advertising campaigns to the same audience, regardless of media channel.

Naturally, advertisers want to buy audiences efficiently. Currently, it is very difficult for an advertiser to plan and evaluate reach and frequency for any specified audience across a whole campaign that might, for example, involve TV, online, print and outdoor. Given the huge spend on TV and digital, it is especially frustrating that these two environments are not better integrated to facilitate advertising to people, not devices.

The subject is, of course, one that is attracting a lot of attention from media owners and adtech vendors. Multi-publisher initiatives, such as OpenAP, are to be applauded and help lay a better foundation for de-duplication and simplified media buying.

However, whilst this greatly improves consumer identification, the question of consistent audience definitions across both digital and TV remains unanswered.

One of the major advances of digital advertising has been the ability to bid and buy for audiences defined by their behavioural affinities, rather than just by demographics or geography. Historically, data vendors, DMPs and analytics providers have used custom taxonomies to describe and segment their audiences, with little or no standardization across vendors. This results in sometimes drastically different descriptions even for similar data.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has attempted to fix this for internet advertising with the introduction of a common nomenclature for audience segment names to improve comparability of data across different providers. To facilitate omnichannel advertising, both the breadth and standardisation of these audiences needs to be available on TV.

Behavioural-based affinities can now be created from first party viewing data, which enables a far greater scale of targeted audience segments that can be used in addressable TV. It is important, though, that these audience definitions are aligned with those used in digital in order that omnichannel campaigns can truly work.

ThinkAdvertising’s out-of-the-box TV attributes solution not only transforms viewing data into accurate audience segments – based on affinity and intent, it does so to the taxonomy prescribed by the IAB, making it simple for TV operators to offer advertisers common targeting across both digital and TV.