Automotive marketers were among the first major advertisers for legacy television.
Now, like just about every other kind of TV advertiser, auto brands are ditching their age-old audience demos for first-party audience data that can drive better results.
This month, NBCUniversal announced General Motors as the first brand to adopt NBCUnified, the broadcaster’s first-party data platform that consolidates Comcast audience data into anonymized IDs to target ads across NBCU’s linear and streaming inventory.
NBCUniversal matches NBCU IDs with other identifiers in its clean room, part of what it calls the NBCU One Platform.
But, according to Heather Stewart, General Motors’ global director of media and marketing, the integration is just one of many stops on GM’s first-party data road map.
General Motors started replacing basic audience demos with audience data three years ago, at the time unrelated to NBCU’s progress on NBCUnified, Stewart told AdExchanger.
And cookie deprecation is why General Motors chose a first-party approach over a third-party data strategy, Stewart said.
The brand selected NBCU as an early media partner, she added, because NBCU is “moving in the same direction with a privacy-focused data exchange that yields better results for marketers.”
Need for speed
For General Motors, switching to audience-based targeting is mostly a matter of efficiency.
Not so long ago, General Motors bought essentially all of its media based on audience demo ratings, including vehicle ownership data pulled only twice a year by companies like Polk Data Services, Stewart said. But with the consumption shift to streaming and the data from digital channels, “demos aren’t sufficient to construct media plans anymore, [even] for traditional media buyers,” Stewart said.
Only 2% of the US population is in-market for a new or used car at any given time, according to Stewart. And “speaking to America through traditional media models [without targeting parameters] doesn’t really work when you’re looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
Without audience information, marketers are just “scattering dollars,” Stewart said. “We’re building a much more sophisticated wheelhouse now.”
Now, General Motors pins 40% of its media buys as “audience-informed,” rather than demo-based.
Sorting it out
General Motors is focused on building its brand by diversifying its messaging.
The company sells other products and services besides cars, including in-vehicle navigation, security systems and electric vehicle software packages, that it can target. And GM also needs to message the 98% of Americans who aren’t in-market for a car.
“We’re spending a lot of marketing energy developing [new] audiences for the future,” Stewart said. Those efforts include product marketing strategies geared to electric vehicles.
General Motors now has about 100 unique audience segments. A Cadillac customer might prefer or respond differently to certain media channels compared with, say, a Chevy owner, to take another GM brand.
Stewart said consumer media preferences also inform the creative served to different audiences based on brand sentiment.
Looping around
General Motors has proven the value of its first-party data strategy in targeting particular audiences. And general campaign attribution is up next, according to Stewart.
“We’ve done a lot of testing, and we’re seeing definite improvement in our media performance against high-propensity audiences,” she said. “We’re on the path toward closed-loop measurement on the dollars we spend.”
GM is making progress on attribution with the help of its data clean room investments, she said.
And NBCUniversal’s clean room is one of many cropping up left and right to accommodate ad targeting demands with user privacy rules. There are still questions about how data clean rooms can and should work, which is why the IAB Tech Lab is preparing new clean room standards by the end of the year.
Full industry collaboration across clean rooms is still pending. But, in the meantime, clean rooms still generate valuable audience insights.
NBCUniversal, for example, doesn’t allow General Motors to match its data to NBCU IDs and then target those audiences across other publishers’ inventory. But the company does recognize that’s the end goal of clean rooms, said Nick Illobre, SVP of product strategy and business development at NBCUniversal.
For now, General Motors’ integration within NBCUnified is meant to “bring together first-party assets and surface them to create audience insights that inform media buys in a way that protects privacy,” Illobre said.
NBCUniversal does expect General Motors to take its enhanced audience understanding elsewhere, too, Illobre said. But when it comes to widely scaling anonymized IDs across digital channels, he emphasized the need for extreme caution before putting identity data into programmatic pipes.
