Brad Stockton, senior VP U.S. national video innovation at at agency dentsu, calls DELTA, the advanced programmatic buying system the agency unveiled earlier this year, his baby.
Stockton will be a keynote speaker on Nov. 16 at the Advanced Advertising Summit from Broadcasting+Cable’s parent company Future plc.
One of the industry’s better acronyms, DELTA stands for Data Enabled Linear TV Activation. Stockton says the platform enables clients to optimize and buy against their against strategic audiences.
“Delta is a platform that's going to give you the ability to take your strategic audiences. Find out what are they watching, which networks, which dayparts and time periods. And then, let's buy against those strategic audiences and, and hold the media more accountable, for both the reach and action,” he said.
Brands have been slow to shift from the traditional approach of buying based on age and sex demographics, but Stockton said the results can be persuasive.
“Quite frankly, once you test it, one you’ve have a taste of it, you’re coming back because it’s delicious and it works.”
At this point DELTA handles linear national TV networks. Those traditional viewing is down, Stockton says they still have a lot of viewers. “All these network have great audiences and strategic audiences that are tuning in every day,” he said. On top of that, there are “long-tail” networks in particular where advertisers using Delta can find consumers they should be targeting.
“Delta is a great opportunity for us to really, push, push the industry and work with our publishers on finding your right audiences in national linear TV and connecting the dots across all of them,'' Stockton said.
But linear networks are only part of the video picture and Stockton eventually sees DELTA handling cross-cross buying including connected TV, which is a hot area right now. Then it would become DELTA Plus.
“So Delta in year one is truly national linear TV and Delta Plus, we're starting to roll out slow and steady. But we are definitely looking to make that cross screen,” he said.
During the Advanced Advertising Summit keynote, Stockton will also discuss how, as an executive will the word “innovation” in his title, Stockton said he spends a good part of his time explaining new technology and approaches to colleagues and clients.
He’s a big believer in encouraging clients to start by testing promising innovations.
“Every campaign isn’t going to drive a 150% increase in ROI. You have to accept that from the beginning,” Stockton said. “However we know that if we don’t test things, we’re never going to be able to learn.”
Having that learning agenda is crucial to the industry making progress.
“I’m not saying move 90% of your budget into a new tactic. But maybe there’s that 1-5-10% range,” he said. “We need to carve that aside for that learning agenda and plan to test the new projects that are out there because that could be the new way of buying in the next two to three years.”
Stockton will also address addressable advertising at the Advanced Advertising Summit.
