AT&T AdWorks, the advanced ads division of the telecom company, is baking two new data sources into its TV audience-targeting tool, TV Blueprint.
One source – anonymous, aggregate data on some 70 million subscribers – gives advertisers working with AT&T the ability to reach people based on factors like device, operating system, whether or not they’re heavy data users or the status of their carrier contract.
The second source is single-person household viewer data derived from 15 million AT&T U-verse set-top boxes. This type of targeting is more accurate, said Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP of marketing and ad sales strategy at AT&T AdWorks.
“[In a] multiperson household, it’s harder to nail down who is actually watching the TV,” Mandel Dunsche said. “By narrowing it down to single-person household, you get a better idea of what different audiences view and can then extrapolate and develop a more broad-based media plan.”
Essentially, single-person household data can make multiperson household campaigns smarter. Although AT&T U-verse reaches 5.9 million households, AT&T AdWorks gives marketers the ability to run data-optimized TV Blueprint media buys and reach as many as 50 million households via its multichannel video programming distribution network (MVPD) that includes players like Cox Communications.
“What we can model, for example, is if somebody is trying to reach a tech-savvy audience,” Mandel Dunsche said. “We can find women who are 25-35 with income levels over $100,000 that are married with children and have smartphones and are heavy data users. We can get that granular level in our targeting that goes beyond the standard age and gender that traditional TV planning uses.”
AT&T AdWorks is among a gaggle of companies working to connect mobile data with TV metrics. Nielsen, during its Q2 earnings call Tuesday, outlined plans to incorporate mobile measurement into its TV ratings offering. Although AT&T shifted away from developing a mobile and online ad network, it has renewed its focus on advanced TV.
“We’re really focused on our owned-and-operated properties through U-verse and third-party relationships to broaden our reach with video and TV ad inventory,” Mandel Dunsche said. “When we overlay the first-party mobile data we have, I think it [creates] something really unique in the industry.”
