Nielsen announced its latest offering for cross-platform advertising: Nielsen Online Audience Segments – TV Viewing links online and offline consumer behaviors by providing marketers the ability to connect with TV audiences online and more strategically align their TV and online ad campaigns. Microsoft, Adap.TV, Specific Media, Undertone, and Videology are early adopters of this solution and are using it to optimize ad opportunities for their clients.
Nielsen Online Audience Segments – TV Viewing works by leveraging Nielsen’s unique data assets and TV knowledge and correlating how people watch TV with how they behave online.
Nielsen uses a unique, representative sample of both TV and online panelists, providing a privacy-protected source for robust segment models based on viewers, rather than households. By building segments based on types of TV viewership, including shows or channels most viewed, heavy or light viewers, genres and viewer attributes, Nielsen is able to model a group of consumers ideal for a specific campaign or message.
Nielsen Online Audience Segments – TV Viewing provides specific TV viewing patterns (eg: Heavy Viewers of Sports Programming) or sets of rules on how to identify an online audience that represent specific TV viewing patterns (eg: an algorithm on how to find Heavy Viewers of Sports Programming). Clients are also able to model segments based on attributes including:
–Program Attributes such as Show, Network, Genre, Daypart
–Viewer Attributes: Demographics like Income, Ethnicity, Presence of Family, Geography, Browsing Habits and more
–Advertising Attributes such as exposure to Brands, Brand Parent, Product Category or volume of exposures.
As part of its Nielsen Online Audience Segments solution, Nielsen also offers the ability to reach consumers online based on lifestyle, demographics and consumer packaged goods (CPG) habits.
As mentioned above, Nielsen Online Audience Segments can be accessed in multiple ways – including an application programming interface (API), a direct match system, or by server-to-server matching with Nielsen’s data management platform (DMP), powered by eXelate – based on how Nielsen collaborators choose to manage the buying or selling of inventory.
“Being able to interact with consumers online who are, for example, heavy viewers of college sports or home design programming, or light television viewers who are difficult to reach through that medium, can prove invaluable to marketers as they’re planning their advertising campaigns,” said Jonathan Carson, GM/Digital for Nielsen. “We’re excited to have such great collaborators using this solution from the outset.”
Added Said Scott Ferber, Chairman and CEO, Videology: “The ability to extend planning seamlessly across television and online video is an extremely important step in the evolution of the industry. Whether this data is used to increase the impact of an existing television campaign, or to extend reach by targeting light television users who might not otherwise be exposed to a campaign, the end result is the same— breaking down the silos between consumers’ viewing experiences. Data that allows advertisers to focus on the consumer, rather than on the device, will lead to a more holistic assessment of campaign results and ultimately, to a truer assessment of ROI.”
RBR-TVBR asked Videology’s Michele Skettino (yes, she was previously with Interep) how an advertiser might use their TV Amplifier product based on Nielsen’s data: “TV Amplifier allows television advertisers to proactively manage reach, frequency, efficiency and effectiveness across TV and online video ad placements. Depending on campaign objectives, Videology’s product offers television advertisers several different benefits and uses:
· The ability to create custom segments based on specific television programs or television ads viewed, enabling marketers to target similar viewers across devices
· The option to extend a television campaign with supplementary, interactive components
· The capacity to augment the frequency of a television buy—or build awareness among light or hard-to-reach television viewers—with incremental cost increases using digital video
· The ability to determine cross-device duplicated and unduplicated reach with greater accuracy.”
The introduction of Nielsen Online Audience Segments – TV Viewing joins other recent Nielsen advancements in the online advertising ecosystem, including the launch of the Nielsen Innovation Lab, designed to identify and develop ideas that elevate understanding of ad effectiveness across platforms, and recent enhancements to the Nielsen Campaign Ratings suite which adds capabilities for viewability, verification and breakthrough for online ads.
