Time Warner Cable Media Sales hopes to fuel-inject the automotive advertising category by making it easier for car dealers to understand who’s buying what within the unique advertising-distribution geographies Time Warner maintains.
The second-largest U.S. local cable advertising company signed a deal with Claritas Inc. to arm Time Warner Media Sales researchers and AEs with R.L. Polk & Co. data about auto registrations across ZIP codes. Time Warner Cable Media Sales is the first MSO to subscribe to the new Polk data module that has been integrated within the Claritas AdSelect platform, according to Claritas VP Morris Sneor. Making certain variables from the Polk database available directly from the AdSelect platform allows cable researchers to analyze auto sales and registration data more quickly and with greater ease than was the case when they imported the records from a separate database, Sneor says.
Phyllis Leibert, Sr. Director of corporate research for Time Warner Cable Media Sales, said in a press release the module offers an “on-the-fly” way to demonstrate ways for auto dealers to target buyers in selected geographies. A common application, Sneor said, would be to compare vehicle registrations tied to dealers that compete within the same geographic area. “If dealer A is doing well, and they’re advertising on cable, the MSO can go to dealer B and show the contrast in their performance,” he said.
Claritas’s AdSelect is among a new breed of industry research tools that aim to unify a variety of data inputs into a central resource that blends market data with the unique set of geographic zones offered by cable advertising sellers. “For the first time, we are able to seamlessly stitch together these research tools that were previously unlinkable,” Leibert said. Time Warner Cable Media Sales has used AdSelect since its May 2005 introduction.
