By Peter White
Nielsen this week pretty much legitimized the work that advertising sell side platform Clypd and its associated broadcasters have done over the past few years, building a new Audience Forecasting tool in time for this year’s Upfront negotiations.
The aim seems to be to bring what Nielsen describes as “audience based buying” but on the TV, rather than online. It says that this brings both consistency and transparency to buying advertising by audience on the TV. It does this by simply using Nielsen data to predict the size of each audience accurately in advance.
Clypd has been around since 2012 and has recruited Disney’s ABC, A+E, AMC Networks, Discovery Communications, Fox, GSN, Scripps, The Weather Channel, 20th Television and CIMM to its sell side system. It has spent years building standards through the Advanced Target Standards Group (ATSG) on how they should measure audiences. It claims it can reach around 42% of the $74 billion US television advertising spend through these partners.
Much of Clypd’s work was based on Nielsen data, and back in September last year the two announced they would work together to combine data from the Clypd sell side platform and Nielsen’s audience-based sales platform.
The idea is that ad buyers can share media plans and audience segments created using Nielsen’s planning tools with sellers using the Clypd sell side platform and allow them to price, evaluate and execute campaigns by raising automated proposals.
In the end this is not programmatic advertising, in that instead of buying only the members of an audience you want, you have to buy the entire audience of a variety of programs, in order to get scale and the precise type of audience you need – be that movie goers or automotive intenders.
What it does is find the most efficient, i.e. cheapest, way to reach these viewers and get them to watch your ads over linear TV and in that way it make a lot of TV programming closer in pricing and effectively to programmatic.
The idea is to give advertisers linear TV targeting based on a lot more than demographics and age and gender. Nielsen calls this its Advanced Audience Forecasting tool and it uses Nielsen’s advanced audience segment definitions and helps media owners predict their precise audience inventory in advance.
To us, this is the legacy linear TV system, believing that the only reason it is losing the war against programmatic is because of a lack of data, rather than accepting that pretty much all TV is going online in about 6 to 7 years where audience buying is a lot easier using programmatic systems and real time inventory auctions. It’s an attempt to innovate but with the aim of slowing down the rate at which revenue leaves the legacy linear TV arena. It also means that agencies will be able to use the same kind of buying criteria whether a viewer is watching online or on a legacy TV system.
“The way marketers and media companies use data to plan, target, transact and measure advertising is evolving. In today’s world of growing content options across devices and platforms, reaching the consumers that matter most—be it first time car buyers or home improvement enthusiasts—is critical for both TV networks and advertisers,” said Kelly Abcarian, SVP, Product Leadership, Nielsen. “To keep up with the changing landscape, advanced tools — like this solution — are now required to accurately forecast TV audiences beyond age and gender.”
Nielsen partners Clypd to bring “audience purchasing” to legacy TV
