TEGNA’s new partnership with Alphonso provides advertising campaign attribution across linear television and OTT “in one fell swoop” and enhances the local station group owner’s consultative sales approach, says VP of Sales Intelligence Jessica Daigle.
“We’ve entered into a new era where people are not buying platforms. It’s not just TV is the only game in town,” Daigle says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re really looking to buy outcomes. You want to make sure that your local grocery chain or furniture store is actually making money, their businesses are thriving.”
Noting that media agency Horizon Media recently indicated a preference for 50% of its TV buys to be based on business outcomes over the next several years, Daigle adds, “That’s a big challenge for the agencies and I think the media community at large. But it’s indicative of where our clients are expecting us to go and so where we’re focused on going.”
In April, TEGNA disclosed that it had chosen Alphonso’s data and analytics to show the effectiveness of linear TV and OTT, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. That followed months of pilot testing that have produced encouraging results, according to Daigle.
“It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” she says.
The three KPI’s that TEGNA can now track are reach extension, website traffic and retail visitation using information about viewer location.
Alphonso uses data from smart TV’s in more than 30 million households to give a second-by-second view of where national ads appear and alongside which programs, among other insights. In Houston, for example, Alphonso’s footprint is some 800,000 households while Nielsen measures 800, according to Daigle.
“The amount of data is just mind boggling, so that’s one of the reasons we’re partnering with them.”
A standard local TV buy might reach one million households on linear, 200,000 on OTT “and maybe low single digits, four percent of TV viewers also saw OTT.” This shows 160,000 incremental homes by adding OTT. “It’s a pretty compelling case for why you need both.”
At this point, there’s far more data to corral beyond the three main KPI’s than can be used easily and instantly.
“Our goal is to make this really simple,” Daigle explains. “I don’t want to get kicked out of a car dealership by making it too complicated. It’s not a one-stop-shop solution. We’re not going to run a campaign, get the results and then turn everything we’ve ever known around just based on these results.”
While digital media like social and search are constantly being optimized based on ad results, “if every month we’re able to make tweaks here or there and increase the yields of all of our clients’ campaigns, they’ve been pretty excited about that idea.”
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion. Premion is a unit of TEGNA.
