NBCU Goes Beyond Nielsen With Data Guarantees; New York Is A Testing Ground For Addressable TV & Politics

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Currency Conversion

NBCU is the latest TV network to offer “guarantees” based on data gathered outside traditional Nielsen ratings for the 2016-17 upfront market. The network will use its Audience Targeting Platform to layer advertisers’ first-party data with NBCU viewership data and third-party research to identify and target audience segments at scale. “Traditionally, clients buy Nielsen demographics and we sell against that – that’s the currency,” said Aaron Radin, NBCU’s SVP for partnerships and portfolio products, at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “As clients understand their audiences better and have finer targets, Nielsen demographics just become a proxy for ‘women with kids who are in the market for a minivan.’” More at Mediapost.

Programmatic Petri Dish

New York’s presidential primary is an interesting test case for addressable TV. Cablevision is an early adopter of programmatic and addressable targeting [AdExchanger coverage], and its strength in the market means candidates have a deeper pool (addressable TV is plagued by low match rates). How do you get Spanish-language ads in front of only native Spanish speakers? And since NY primary rules only allow party members to vote (aka a registered independent can’t vote in the primary), broad TV spending is mostly wasted. “It’s a clear case why micro-targeting is important,” said a spokesperson for D2, the addressable TV co-venture from DISH and DirecTV. More at Ad Age.

Auto-Matic

Aupeo GmbH, a radio content delivery service owned by Panasonic, tied up with Triton Digital to deliver targeted, in-vehicle radio ads. Aupeo will plug into Triton’s digital ad platform, Tap OnDemand, and partner with car manufacturers to deliver personalized audio messages to drivers. “The opportunity to inform, engage, and entertain through the dashboard is growing,” said Triton Digital CEO Neal Schore. Read the release. Car innovation is transforming the radio channel.

News Is Breaking

A survey from Parse.ly concludes Facebook and Google are staggeringly far ahead of all other platforms in terms of traffic generation. Twitter has a powerful engine, but it only kicks in for big, breaking news items (like recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels). More in NiemanLab. And social platforms are jealously guarding their distributive powers, as The Information reports giants like Facebook and Twitter are pressuring media companies to kill off profile pictures with code directing users to Snapchat.

But Wait, There’s More!