Specific Media has today announced the launch of TV Audience Segments (TVAS) – a new targeting tool that allows advertisers to accurately reach online users based on their TV viewing.
The tool – which fuses data from Nielsen and BARB – also aims to provide the means to target online segments based on offline viewing habits, thus allowing advertisers to manage a campaign’s ad frequency and sequential messaging to audiences across both mediums.
TVAS has already been trialled by Virgin Holidays and King.com, with Virgin’s marketing manager, Mark Daykin, stating that the new capability allowed the company to “confidently move into online video in such a way that our TV campaign was complimented by online activity and the messaging was therefore more cohesive.”
To fuse the different data, BARB’s TV panel is used as the foundation dataset, with Internet usage fields appended from Nielsen. The approach is built on Nielsen’s global proprietary fusion methodology that identifies similar respondents from the BARB panel and Nielsen’s online panel.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Specific said the linking variables that are used are “vital to the success of data fusion and are thus carefully selected and constantly revisited by Nielsen’s measurement science team.”
Gavin Johnson, Specific Media’s vice president of UK sales – who has taken part in an interview with Newsline looking at the product in more detail – said that TVAS is uniquely positioned to join the dots between TV and online, allowing for a more seamless and effective level of targeting.
“This is part of a huge drive at Specific Media to work towards marketing solutions rather than just digital solutions,” he said.
Matt Dodd, Nielsen’s senior vice president for media analytics in Europe, added: “Specific Media has built a targeting model based on their vast proprietary network data onto Nielsen’s online panel, and utilised the Nielsen TV/Internet Data Fusion to most accurately determine TV viewing habits.
Dodd explained that Nielsen works with and validates Specific Media’s modelling to ensure that the market has the highest quality accuracy and predictions available.
Specific Media Interview: How we reached online users based on their TV viewing.
