“We’ve proven that we can add extra reach by as much as five percentage points – once a linear campaign is at 60% reach, five points is a lot,” said Paola Colombo, General Manager of Adtech, Publitalia ’80 last month, outlining the impact of targeting ads to light TV viewers, who are “very in line” with on-demand consumption.
To track light TV viewers on connected TV and run addressable campaigns to viewers who haven’t yet been exposed, the Italian sales house for Mediaset developed an HbbTV app. Colombo explained: “Once a user is connecting to one of our broadcast channels, minute by minute we know what is going on over the TV screen, so we know if they’ve been exposed to an ad or if they haven’t been reached at all.”
This allows media planners to reach effective frequency levels with each viewer, Colombo said, as Publitalia ‘80 can identify who has been exposed to a linear campaign only once or twice, and can then target those viewers [in connected TV] to increase frequency to four or five exposures.
Colombo stressed that advertising – just like content – should be a conversation between a brand and a consumer across different media. She explained how, through an algorithm, Publitalia ’80 was able to link a TV set with all the people in a household and other media they are consuming, as part of its efforts to establish consumer identity. “We call it the family graph,” Colombo said, “We are able to create this family and know what they are interested in.
“For example, if we knew they were passionate about cooking because they were surfing a specific page on a website, we could serve them a campaign on connected TV based on that.” She elaborated that the company can create extra reach by targeting consumers on mobile phones when Publitalia ‘80 detects that the user has not been served an ad on their TV screen. The sales house can also do sequencing, where the big branding message of a campaign is delivered to users on the TV, and then, later in the afternoon or the next day, they can be targeted [using adjusted creative] with a call to action.
Speaking at Connected TV World Summit last month, Colombo also said attribution modelling performed by Publitalia ’80 could prove the effectiveness of a campaign on business outcomes. Eight million users in Italy have the software that supports the company’s attribution modelling on their mobile devices. Based on the websites, as well as the physical locations, that this super-panel of consumers visits, Publitalia ’80 is able to track their interests.
Speaking about a campaign for automotive brands, she said: “We knew the family behind the TV screen and could see whether they were going to a dealership after watching the ad, or if they were surfing a website after we showed them the CTV campaign. So, we started building attribution modelling and proved that it worked. We could see an uplift in people going to the dealership.” In this way, the sales house is able to “connect the last mile”.
Colombo believes that this kind of attribution modelling points towards a cookie-free future. In the past, linear TV has always worked with panels, she noted, where between 2,000 and 3,000 people would be interviewed and this data would be extrapolated to reflect the population. With attribution modelling, Publitalia ’80 often sees 200,000 to 300,000 users taking an action after seeing ad, which the company tracks. This scale allows the company to “sit in between the two worlds” of linear and digital, while getting the “very explicit consent of the consumer”.
In addition to linear and connected TV, the company recently introduced digital into its attribution modelling, and Colombo says it is now looking to introduce Digital Out Of Home (DOOH).
