HITS Connections

By Chris Tribbey

Allant Group has been around for 30 years, first starting off as a pure marketing services company, with a focus on marketing databases, analytics and customer relationship management (CRM)-related solutions.

According to Allant president Dave Irwin, the Chicago-based company has narrowed its focus in recent years, by building a first-ever advanced ad software platform, one that enables cross-platform, premium video advertising for ad sellers, distributors and programmers.

“It’s the intersection of CRM combined with online, and moving into advanced TV, which is really defined as enabling advertisers to shift from buying programs — based on age and gender characteristics — to buying audiences, those that fit their ideal customers,” he told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).

Irwin sat down with MESA to discuss how advertising in the digital era has changed, and how disparate data sources have proven problematic for targeted advertising.

MESA: In the past five years Allant has pushed hard into the targeted TV and online video ad business. What’s changed in this corner of the media and entertainment business in the past few years, and what does Allant do here that’s unique for its clients?

Irwin: We really saw an opportunity where advertisers have been clamoring for the ability to do targeted TV advertising, something they’ve wanted for well over a decade. The promise of advanced TV has been around for quite some time, and advertisers, during this digital transformation, have been waiting for opportunities in the TV industry. The challenge has been the complexity of the ecosystem that supports it: you have multiple, fragmented distributors — cable, satellite and telecommunication companies — offering access to different audiences. Then you also have a proliferation of programming content, with national and boutique content. Add to that the proliferation of different screens and devices where premiere video content is offered, and you’ve got a complex ecosystem.

Defining the audience you want to reach, across distributors, programmers, devices, can be difficult. Our solution to bringing efficiency and scale to that has taken some time to instrument. And we’ve seen more progress in the past six to 12 months than the previous decade alone, mostly because the premium video content companies — the distributors and the networks — have felt the pressure from the online side. Digital provides a much more efficient way to do ad buying to reach audiences. TV is trying to keep up and get to scale rapidly and quickly.

MESA: Content distributors and content owners may be in the same ecosystem, but their advertising needs can be very different. What does Allant do differently for each?

Irwin: In the context of how we help the ecosystem, we’re focused on improving the TV advertising experience for everyone, including content distributors, networks and advertisers, and ultimately consumers as well. First you need to talk about increasing relevance: for content distributors and networks, their focus is on accurately pinpointing audiences and how best to reach them across video formats, including linear, VOD and online. To help them do that, we provide audience segmentation across multiple data sources through a single interface. We enable true reach and frequency, tied to a specific audience segment, built at a household level, and we provide the back-end campaign measurement, verifying the number of ad impressions delivered for advertisers and ultimately sales results.

In a nutshell, we try to be the easy button for advertisers to enable their audiences to be defined at a more granular level than traditional TV buys, and we translate that definition in terms that TV distributors can operationalize and execute on. For example, let’s say there’s an automotive manufacturer that wants to offer a minivan with a target audience of women aged 25-34, based on Nielsen ratings. Now they can express that audience as high-income soccer moms who have children and an active lifestyle, with a single-family home and located close to dealers who have excess inventory. They want to express that granular definition consistently across distributors and programmers and quickly get counts, find out where they can reach that audience, discover the optimal reach and frequency, and execute a campaign that can reach those households specifically.

Allant sits in the middle and enables that definition to be projected across multiple distributors and programmers, for counts to be run quickly, and then for the campaigns to be executed and measured consistently on the back end. That’s how we’re helping the programmers, the networks and the distributors help the advertisers. From the advertisers’ point of view, they can now bring the principles of direct marketing and CRM to TV, with the right message to the right people at the right time. And consumers receiving the ad get more relevant ads and better engagement with the brands. That’s the core of what advanced TV offers.

Obviously, advanced TV helps increase sales, and certainly it does it a lot more efficiently than the current TV ecosystem allows. Our job is to make advanced TV easier to execute.

MESA: Along those lines: content owners, content distributors and advertisers/marketers have different needs when it comes to data and analytics. What challenges has Allant encountered delivering accurate consumer data for each segment?

Irwin: The main challenge plaguing the content distributors, the MVPDs, is that there are many different data sets that are aggregated together with different specialty files and different demographic files. All of these disparate data sources have to be integrated and overlaid on their subscriber footprints, and when they’re responding to different advertiser requests for audiences, they need to accommodate an advertiser’s preferred data sets to reach a certain level of audience definition. For the distributors to respond quickly and effectively right now, they have to use multiple count systems, send different count requests to third-party data providers, and it can often take weeks to turn all of that around, going back and forth on different scenarios, which can be very time-consuming.

Our Allant Audience Interconnect platform, a data-enabled software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution and analytic platform for advanced TV, takes all these data sets and puts them into a single user interface, an application that sits on the desktop of ad sales research teams, who can, in a matter of seconds as opposed to weeks, run multiple audience selection scenarios for advertisers. When the advertiser or agency is ready to make the media buy, it automatically outputs that media file to ad execution systems, on the formats expressed in the campaign specifications. And then on the back end, we’re measuring the number of campaign impressions, the true reach and frequency of those campaigns, and rolling that into reports that again enable the distributor to have third-party verification from Allant to communicate that the ad campaign ran the way it was intended.

It’s all about efficiency and speed, which means more throughput, more sales, and a much better experience for an advertiser or agency in terms of the speed with which their advanced TV campaigns are managed.

MESA: What are some of Allant’s favorite success stories and examples where media and entertainment companies made especially good use of the company’s offerings?

Irwin: We have several case studies that highlight some of our greatest success stories.

A financial services advertiser wanted to reach consumers based on custom profiles, including upper-level income households, presence of children and history with a financial advisor. Historically, TV buyers have been offering up viewers based only on age and gender, and online media buyers have been restricted to using consumers’ online behavior history, such as recent broker/ advisor searches. Also, in order to show how well advertising campaigns do, performance reports have been piecing together non-streamlined information across different platforms.

Allant and partner premium video distributors enabled the financial services advertiser to reach its custom audience segments across linear TV, VOD and online display ad formats. Allant’s Audience Interconnect software helped identify the right households to reach beyond age and gender, identify how many target households were reachable for each ad format, and produce post-campaign reports that measured who saw the ads and how often.

An additional five to twenty percent of the target audience saw the ads in VOD and online display. The ability to reach additional households prompted the advertiser to spend more on the campaign to achieve incremental sales.

An automotive advertiser wanted to reach households likely to buy luxury cars or with more than $100,000 in income. Allant and partner premium video distributors executed a multi-format campaign across linear TV and VOD telescoping ad formats (telescoping is an interactive overlay on the ad that allows viewers to click with a TV remote to get more information on a product or service).

The campaign was 20% more effective at reaching target households than non-targeted ads in markets where cable ads are most likely to reach the target audience. The ad campaign also reached 20% more households than traditional or linear TV alone, and 20% of the target households were exposed to two or more ad formats. Additionally, the ad campaign reached more target households with each ad spot on specific networks, and it triggered up to double the click-through rate in prime time spots versus other day parts.

In order to promote its movies on demand, a movie studio wanted to use linear TV viewing and VOD activity history to define its custom target audience segments and to identify the most prominent programming to reach these viewers. Allant and partner cable distributors executed monthly campaigns that promoted movies on demand during those network shows watched by viewers who already buy or are likely to buy their on-demand movies.

By optimizing how often the promotions for movies on demand are shown to the desired viewers and during which network shows, the targeted campaigns are yielding a more effective CPM. Allant’s program measures the success of the campaign during and after its run.

MESA: What’s next for Allant?

Irwin: The next big thing for Allant and the TV industry is the integration of TV with online campaigns. Everyone is aware that the digital ecosystem has been separate from the TV ecosystem, and advertisers and agencies are interested in running coordinated TV and online digital campaigns where they can reach the same audience. The ability to map these campaigns, scale nationally across distributors and reach that same audience in online display ads, that’s the next area of development that we see coming.

Marrying TV and online is a big change for the advertisers and agencies that buy the ads and the ecosystems that supports them, but that integration and coordination is going to occur.