Dive Brief:
- Viacom, the cable company with networks including Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and MTV, wants to make data a central part of its upfront deals with marketers, predicting that 80% of those deals will include data in some way, according to Ad Age.
- In a bid to make audience data more accessible to marketers, Viacom rolling out five new products designed to simplify and expand the reach of buying target audiences.
- The products will allow marketers to automate targeting beyond basic demographics and get into buying intent and more granular demographic data points.
Dive Insight:
Data today has become essential to modern marketing, but marketers haven’t quite connected the dots between tracking data and then applying it. The challenge for marketers is being able to sift through the data for meaningful signals they can use.
"A lot of clients want to talk about data because they know they should be talking about data, but not everyone can do it," Jeff Lucas, head of marketing and partner solutions at Viacom, told Ad Age. "For marketers who don't know the specific segment they want to target or don't want to share it, we created category segmentations and can plug the audience in."
The new products include Vantage Instant Audience, which taps into audience segments already identified by Viacom, meaning advertisers don’t have to bring their own first-party data for targeting. Another product, Vantage Target Discover, helps marketers find potential customers that are likely to be open to messaging through Viacom’s research on its users’ website and social media behavior.
Bringing data to TV ad buying is a trend with media companies, although there’s some concern about the effects of each company putting its own data division into place. “The big thing we have to resolve is whether we’ll have walled gardens at each network," Jonathan Bokor, senior vice president and director of advanced media at ad buyer MediaVest, told the Wall Street Journal last month. "If all of the TV networks look at the power of Google and Facebook, they’d all love to replicate that. And we’re not so into that.”