Finding the Voters a Linear-Only TV Buy Missed
How Comcast Advertising and Smart Media Group used a data-driven strategy to close a linear TV gap and maximize voter reach.
The question any campaign should be asking itself about a linear TV buy this cycle: Who will the buy miss, and how can they close that exposure gap?
The core problem isn’t a new one, but it has taken on new importance in today’s media environment. Broadcast buys target a specific audience that the campaign wants to reach but when that flight goes dark, the gap between the target universe and actual exposure remains largely invisible. A collaboration between Comcast Advertising and Smart Media Group set out to make that gap visible
An issue advocacy group ran a linear TV campaign targeting voting audiences in two congressional districts. When the broadcast flight ended, thousands of target households still hadn’t seen the message.
“In the traditional media space, you’re targeting programs that are likely to hit your audience, but there’s no household identification on that,” said Sean Meenagh, Senior Political Sales Manager at Comcast Advertising. That’s where Comcast’s exposure retargeting tool “LENS” comes in. “We can provide household level performance metrics showing which audiences you reached, where you’re well-saturated, and the audiences you’ve missed entirely.”
According to Meenagh, it brings to linear TV buying a capability traditionally confined to digital buying. LENS can identify household-level exposures to a campaign’s spots on any network (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, local or national, and not just cable networks) by matching ad logs against set-top-box viewing data.
“It’s doing something that is typically unique to the streaming world: audience retargeting based on exposure,” Meenagh said. “It’s something digital has been able to do practically since its inception, but is unheard of on the linear side.”
In the case of this campaign, the buy’s structure made it an ideal proof of concept. The group ran broadcast for roughly three weeks, then went dark. The LENS-powered audience addressable buy began after the broadcast flight ended, delivering the same creative across live TV and streaming exclusively to unexposed households – a strategy that helped ensure that media spend contributed to real incremental reach.
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“Any impressions that were delivered from that day forward were LENS-targeted impressions,” Meenagh said. “It made attribution easy, there was zero noise whatsoever in this campaign.”
The results were clear: a 29 percent increase in households reached. That meant 4,800 unique homes, or 22 percent of the total audience, that traditional television alone would have missed for less than 6 percent of the campaign’s budget.
That efficiency is the point, said Meenagh: “It is more valuable hitting somebody for the first, second, third, fourth time than it is the 23rd or 24th time. And that’s what we were able to accomplish.”
We typically see reach curves flatten after about 10 days on air, so beginning in the third week of a flight, advertisers will start to see a spike in their reach curve using LENS targeting. There’s a clear blueprint: “Anybody who’s on the air for any length of time has a target they want to reach, and we can help them hit households that otherwise would have been missed.”
Wondering how many voters your TV buy is missing? Contact Comcast Advertising today to learn how data-driven innovation can transform political media buying and deliver maximum efficiency.
