Pintarget founders Rachel Hall and Charlie Makin have launched an agency specialising in addressable media.
Be Addressable, described by the pair as the UK’s first specialist addressable media agency, already has a number of clients including broadband provider Airband, which they have been working with for the past five years.
Hall will take on the role of managing director and is already running Airband’s £1.5m summer campaign. Makin will be strategy director.
Earlier this year, Makin unveiled a start-up consultancy, Work It Out, which will now become part of the Be Addressable offering.
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‘Massive opportunity’
Makin and Hall told The Media Leader that one of the reasons they wanted to launch Be Addressable was that they started Pintarget — which later sold to The Specialist Works — “too early in many respects”, when addressable media was at its infancy.
Now, with fragmenting audiences and progress in technology, there is “a massive opportunity”.
“The issue now is we are, since lockdown, in an environment where trying to reach people through just mass free-to-air channels is almost impossible. Levels of reach are falling and there’s a generation of live media avoiders, especially younger, more affluent people,” Makin explained. “If clients want to reach any kind of audience basically under 55, they are going to have to look at addressable channels, because you can’t get the same levels of reach that you did previously.”
He insisted that the scale of addressable “is not going to go away”, with advertisers needing an agency’s help to reach audiences across diversified media channels — not just TV.
Makin added: “On one side, there’s a threat, but on the other side, there’s a massive opportunity — for the first time, clients can focus on identifying and reaching customers and building relationships with customers who are most valuable.”
More strategic approach
Hall told The Media Leader that “nobody at the moment is bringing all the available platforms for addressing audiences together”. So Be Addressable aims to help clients identify how to use all of that data “in a much more strategic” and “joined-up” way.
She continued: “There are lots of people who are doing addressable, but they’re all doing it just for digital or just for TV or just for OOH, and actually potentially targeting different people, because the ways that people are developing those addressable audiences are different.”
Be Addressable seeks to examine all of the data available to work out, in “a multilayered way”, an addressable audience of the same people through lots of channels.
And since all media is now addressable, this allows advertisers to have “a completely different relationship with audiences”, where “data, technology and media meet”, Hall explained.
Another priority is to provide more transparency and objectiveness to data-driven planning and to avoid talking about “data” as one big thing.
Pintarget recruit
Be Addressable has recruited Paola Orioli as client director from Pintarget and has also a contracted team of customer and locational data specialists.
Before Pintarget, Hall held a number of roles in radio and press at Zenith for 15 years.
Makin founded media independent Booth Lockett Makin, which later sold to Havas, and began his career at Saatchi & Saatchi.
Be Addressable will be based in central London and is financially backed by its founders.
