A Portland, Ore., based ad agency R2C Group is launching a new company that will join the race to give advertisers tools that help them place TV advertising where it is most effective.
The new company is called Leavened, and its key product is called WaveCast.
Wavecast takes a media schedule and systematically removes one element from a media buy and uses regression analyses to determine how much that part of the buy contributes to sales, based on a client’s first party sales data.
“It’s very granular and it’s very actionable,” says Jane Crisan, R2C Group’s president and COO.
“We really were building these for our media buyers to give them signals about where to place the next piece of media, what was working, what was not working,” Crisan said.
Wavecast is a already being used by some R2C clients including Chewy.com, Peloton and SimpliSafe.
Those clients are largely direct response buyers, but Crisan says that in order to grow their business they will have to use traditional brand commercial inventory. That requires tools to measure and compare direct response and traditional inventory.
Crisan says that the company is aiming to sell the tools to other clients that are expanding their media footprint and also to clients who have their media in-housebut don’t have access to the big data bases large media buyers have.
Unlike some sales attribution systems being developed, Wave cast does not attempt to match whether individual buyers saw a particular ad ands bought the sponsors product.
“There’s a lot of activity in that by-the=person space and when we analyze it, and look at all the players in that space, there just isn’t scale there,” Crisan says. “And so there’s a lot of time and effort that can be spent, but we find it tends to be the client wants to scale quickly. This is what we’re finding to be impactful."
