ThinkAnalytics, the personalised content discovery provider, recently announced further enhancements to its addressable advertising solution, ThinkAdvertising, which integrates first-party behavioural data and content analysis with a broader set of metadata, for the purpose of improving ad targeting. According to ThinkAnalytics, the inclusion of support for the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) affinity taxonomy represents a significant step forward for ad relevancy and accessing light TV viewer categories.
Based on ThinkAnalytics’ content intelligence and user profiling, user behaviour and other data, and operated through AI/machine learning algorithms, the ThinkAdvertising targeted advertising solution promises greater behaviour-predictive power and improved audience segmentation into purchasing categories. ThinkAnalytics notes that the service can operate effectively without the need for any other external data, but still has the capacity to integrate other data sources when desired.
Significantly, the service now supports the IAB taxonomy (widely used by media buyers for digital ad campaigns), leveraging over 160 audience affinities (for example, luxury cars) to facilitate the automated creation of viewer segments for addressable advertising. ThinkAnalytics believes this could also help advertisers access light TV viewers by identifying what audience members in this category watch and are interested in, and tailoring adverts played to them accordingly.
Pete Doherty, CTO of ThinkAnalytics, emphasises the efficacy of the solution, commenting: “Based on our latest proof of concepts with customers, viewer engagement is up thanks to improved ad relevancy, as are those all-important ad premiums.”
With regards to the expected purchasing intent of viewers in a certain category, rather than using a binary ‘intent present/no intent’ methodology, the technology assigns a sensitivity score that varies in strength based on viewing behaviour, giving advanced warning of potential purchasing intent to advertisers. In practice, this means that ThinkAdvertising can detect a viewer’s interest in purchasing, for example, trekking tours, based on their consumption of trekking vacation content, and approximate the strength of this intent through predictive behaviour analysis. Once a viewer has been designated within a certain affinity category, targeted ads can appear to them while consuming any content (and not only content relating to their predicted purchasing intent.)
Tony Mooney, SVP of Advertising at ThinkAnalytics, stresses the importance these developments might represent for the “TV fight back”: “Targeted or addressable advertising has fallen far behind what’s available in the digital media world because it has been hampered by the lack of accurate targeting attributes,” he comments. “ThinkAdvertising is a critical component in the TV fight-back, helping video service providers capture more advertising dollars by providing new and existing TV advertisers with engaged hyper-targeted audiences and a great ROI from their TV campaigns.”
