Simulmedia, a pioneer in data-driven TV ad targeting, has made a deal to use information about consumer behavior from the Oracle Data Cloud to create more effective and efficient ad campaigns for marketers.
Oracle, which bills itself as the biggest data marketplace in the industry, says this deal is the first step in a more aggressive move into the TV space.
The move shows that planning and buying advertising campaigns based on data is becoming more accepted in the TV business. NBCUniversal says it plans to sell $1 billion worth of its ad inventory based on data. And Turner, Viacom and Fox have formed the OpenAP consortium designed to standardize data-based audience buying and reporting.
“We’ve been at this for a while and we always saw the promise that leveraging really big, rich data sets had to make a difference in TV,” said Simulmedia founder and CEO Dave Morgan.
“Now we’re at a place where you really need the mother lode of data, and nobody has access to more targeting data about online and offline behaviors than Oracle,” Morgan said. “It’s very exciting to be the first to bring what is truly trillions of dollars’ worth of transaction data to targeting TV advertising.”
Working together, Oracle Data Cloud and Simulmedia will enable advertisers to deliver national TV campaigns that reach their target households based on offline transaction data. Marketers can also deliver campaigns to syndicated and custom audience segments from Oracle’s BlueKai Marketplace, as well as using their own first-party data.
Oracle says it has been active in the digital space but has remained out of TV because the complexity of linear TV made it challenging, according to Joe Kyriakoza, VP and GM of automotive at Oracle Data Cloud.
“The goal is to allow advertisers to use our data to improve the effectiveness of their TV campaigns,” Kyriakoza said. “We work with 97 of the top 100 advertisers and it’s something that we heard up and down that list is people really want to take our data into the TV landscape to help make their business there better.”
He says the TV business has become more progressive and that Simulmedia was a good first partner because its founders have “digital DNA, so they’re very much plugged into this world and understand the needs and the benefits of what our data does in digital and how it can translate to TV.”
Oracle will consult with marketers to make sure they’re using the appropriate data in the right way in order to improve the results of their advertising.
“TV advertising is a $70 billion-plus industry, and that’s a big bucket of money that can benefit from being a lot smarter,” Kyriakoza said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Oracle expects to make more deals in the TV space in the near future and that Simulmedia will be providing the links between Oracle’s data about consumer behavior and off line transactions—particularly in the automotive, consumer packaged goods and retail industries—with TV viewing.
Simulmedia’s Morgan says it will use purchase data to evaluate the performance of its clients’ campaigns.
Simulmedia’s Performance TV is built on its proprietary VAMOS platform, which creates data-driven audiences, predicts viewership of the audiences, builds optimized performance-based media plans, and reports on media delivery and outcomes. The result is more sales per media dollar spent by brands and an average of between 30 and 100 percent higher ROI for every campaign, the company says.
