How can campaigns reach voters who are consuming media on multiple screens? The Republican digital firm Targeted Victory has rolled out a new partnership with Rentrak aimed at helping campaigns do just that.
Targeted Victory plans on layering Rentrak’s TV viewing data into Audience Exchange, a catalogue that uses consumer-based data from providers i360, Datalogix, and Lotame. The partnership is notable given the role Rentrak data played in 2012—the Obama campaign contracted with the data provider to better target persuadable voters based on their TV viewing habits.
We caught up with Targeted Victory’s co-founder Michael Beach, whose firm was at the center of Mitt Romney’s digital efforts in 2012, to talk about the partnership with Rentrak.
C&E: What can consumers expect from Targeted Victory’s partnership with Rentrak?
Beach: I think that this is a good opportunity to bridge the different pieces of a campaign together. Traditionally, you would have a broadcast and cable buy and an online buy, so we aligned the two. This will allow us to help the campaign increase reach, trend online, and increase the frequency of the people who watch both online and offline.
C&E: What’s the value add here that differentiates Audience Exchange this from the other services layered into your catalogue?
Beach: Audience Exchange is our marketplace for where we bring the best data providers from both inside and outside of politics and allow our clients to access their data. It lets our clients access their data through client engagement, so they can combine and use different data resources with political data to create finite and unique universes of people. They can create specific audiences of people.
C&E: How do you expect the trend of straying away from traditional television viewing habits to continue in 2014?
Beach: I think both the broadcast and the digital mediums are growing, but I think that a larger share of this development is going digital. It’s always been that there are two groups of people: live TV watchers, who compose 17% of viewers, and “off the grid” viewers, meaning people who watch all of their content through streaming or DVR, who compose 30% of viewers. But what we’ve seen in the last year’s research is a third middle group which we’re calling “screen agnostic.” These people are trending away from only live TV, but are consuming on numerous devices. These people compose the largest group of the three, as they compose 54% of viewers. They are who we hope to target with this product.