For decades, television advertisement deals had been guaranteed using only primary demographic metrics specified by age and gender. In the last few years, data fusion has allowed viewership data to be fused with frequent shopper card data, credit card data or even custom surveys to construct targeted TV audience segments such as “cereal buyers” or “auto intenders.” These new, more granular audience segments have challenged traditional ways of forecasting, scheduling, and managing inventory in the media industry. Through advanced analytics, Turner has taken the lead in offering targeted ad products that better address the needs of our advertiser and agency partners.
Turner has developed two core audience targeting solutions: TargetingNOW and AudienceNOW. TargetingNOW takes an existing advertising deal, which is still guaranteed on demographic viewership and maintains its original media mix, and optimizes its spot placements to increase the delivery of a secondary targeted segment. AudienceNOW relaxes many, but not all, of the traditional mix constraints to produce fully optimized deals and spot placements that maximize targeted audience delivery across the entire portfolio of Turner’s networks.
A suite of advanced analytics tools power these targeting solutions. On the descriptive side, analysis and visualization tools present detailed historical or predictive information for particular segments and allow comparison of Turner networks against competitors. On the predictive side, a scalable, accurate and data-agnostic forecasting approach called Competitive Audience Estimation can build granular estimates for virtually any audience segment. Finally, on the prescriptive side, large-scale, mixed-integer-programming models optimize deal composition and spot placements.