Cadent is launching a new self-serve version of its platform that will make it easier for media buyers and marketers to mount large scale, national addressable advertising campaigns.
The Cadent Advanced TV Platform provides access to 70 million addressable households served by cable operators, satellite distributors and over-the-top networks despite the differences in their technical and back-office set ups. It allows the user to select target audiences, campaign goals, and data providers and receive feedback about the campaign’s performance.
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Cadent executives said the system should encourage marketers to do more data-driven advertising and bring national demand to its inventory sources.
“Television, the most powerful storytelling medium, must evolve to satisfy the needs of today’s analytics-savvy advertisers,” said Eoin Townsend, chief product officer of Cadent. “Cadent’s mission is to help the TV ecosystem evolve to this data-driven future, and with this launch, we’ve taken a huge step forward for our advertisers and pay TV partners. We’ve streamlined the complexities of household addressable TV campaigns to help accelerate spend, while helping our partners expand the reach of their unique supply to meet the needs of national buyers.”
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Cadent has been using a similar system internally to plan and execute campaigns. The company said it has done more than 3,000 TV ad campaigns. It gets ad inventory from most of the largest multichannel video programming distributors, including Comcast, DirecTV, Dish, Spectrum, Altice and Oath.
“National advertisers want to target audiences at national scale. They don’t just want a section of someone’s footprint,” said Paul Alfieri, chief marketing officer at Cadent. “If you look at the TV landscape before today, what that would mean is the advertisers would have to navigate all the different processes and tech platforms of all the addressable suppliers in the U.S.”
That’s made addressable advertising hard, he said.
“We built a workflow that eliminates that complexity,” Alfieri said. “It’s making it easier for the advertiser to transition more of its TV spend to addressable.”
Part of the platform is an intuitive wizard that walks clients through the buying process. The click on campaign goals, such as sales lift, a target demographic and data partners. “We’re completely data agnostics," Townsend said.
After the campaign runs, the system provides the advertisers with results, Cadent runs campaigns using different data, different audience targets and different MVPDs to see which work best.
“Most of our clients have had challenges with understanding addressable or challenges with understanding addressable campaigns, but when we come to them with a true national footprint, with a vibrant ecosystem of data providers and a focus on creating results for them, they come back to us time and time again and we use those learnings over and over and over again to help refine their program,” Townsend said.
Cadent uses machine analysis and people to analyze the campaign. “The interpretation of the results is where our people really shine in this. Addressable is such a new medium. There aren’t a lot of experts embedded at national brands that really understand how to read the data. We’re able to provide that expertise back to the client,” Alfieri said.
