TV data company Alphonso is launching Alphonso Local, which will give broadcast stations advertising analytics that will enable them to better compete with digital media companies.
Alphonso Local will enable stations to offer local stations re-targeting capabilities, data-driven audience targeting and closed-loop attribution metrics to quantify the effectiveness of broadcast advertising.
The NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations group has already signed up for Alphonso Local, according to Alphonso, and a number of other major station groups are testing the product.
“Local TV ad budgets have been threatened by encroaching social, search and digital platforms which have generally provided analytics in conjunction with media, even though TV remains the most widespread and powerful medium,” said Ashish Chordia, founder and CEO of Alphonso.
“With Alphonso Local now local broadcasters can pinpoint TV audiences across all the digital devices they use, to amplify their TV ads, engage viewers with targeted brand messages and offers, and demonstrate the efficacy of those ads in driving business outcomes, and even outperforming these other digital platforms,” Chordia said.
Alphonso uses automation--a combination of automated content recognition and machine learning--to recognize individual commercials and data from a variety of sources to provide real-time intelligence on the advertising market.
Alphonso has been been working with national networks but sees a big opportunity in local TV, a $20 billion market, where most ads are still bought and sold based on age and sex demographics, rather than more focused targets based product use and lifestyle data.
Chordia says Alphonso’s technology give it unique advantages in local markets. Its automated system for recognizing commercial creative is important for identifying local advertisers and localized versions of national ads.
Identifying individual ads is difficult on a national basis. “When you go from national broadcast to local broadcast that problem explodes. Advertisers in every DMA will spit out different creative. So your problem of recognizing ads gets multiplied 200 times because you have 210 DMAs,” he said.
With Alphonso ability to pinpoint the lift in web traffic, store visits or retail sales in homes where consumers saw particular TV ads, “the local broadcaster is now able to go and basically stand shoulder to should to a digital company,” Chordia said. “It’s super empowering for them because the were losing money left and right [to digital], not being able to prove the value. Now they’re able to prove the value of their local broadcast inventory using Alphonso data.”
Going local is a big effort for Alphonso and it is being spearheaded for now by Chordia.
The biggest challenge we have is education because it is a very complex new product we’re bringing to the market,” he said.
Chordia said that Alphonso’s track record in the national ad market should help it gain credibility with local stations. And that if it is successful in the local markets, that will help it with national networks and advertisers.
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