A New Lens on Maximizing Ad Sales

By: Leanne Cochrane Original Article

With a large proportion of advertisers’ budgets going to campaigns inside the walled gardens of Facebook and Google, other publishers have to work harder to secure desired ad dollars. The streaming providers are no exception here, whether they are looking for traditional ad revenue for free services or “sponsored” revenue via product placements in original content. Affinio and Infutor partnered up to showcase how Streaming Providers, or any Media & Entertainment ‘publisher’, can highlight the nuances of its viewership for ad revenue purposes.

Inform Ad Sales to maximize revenue

Let’s take the perspective of the Ad Sales team at Hulu, who knows it’s key to pitch the right ad placement to prospective advertisers. Hulu can apply audience insights to recommendations for both traditional ads and sponsored content.

Using Infutor’s Total Consumer Insights file of rich US household profile data, Hulu can easily assess the persona of subscribers with high passion levels for different products, services, or activities represented by advertisers. Say Hulu wanted to proactively pitch an automaker, they could uncover their auto-enthusiast persona in one simple query. By selecting all anonymized household IDs where the auto passion index is high (i.e. 7-9 on Infutor’s scale) and a subscription to Hulu exists, the Affinio engine can instantly determine distinctive behaviors.

From here, they may opt to compare this segment’s persona against all auto-enthusiast households to uncover nuances specific to their viewers. Although this instant comparison reveals many similarities, Hulu’s auto-enthusiasts (shown in green) over-index on some noteworthy attributes relative to all auto-enthusiasts (shown in purple): i.e. slightly younger age bracket, many children in the household, and stronger passion for both high-tech and history. By contrast, although having a do-it-yourself affinity was strong across both auto segments, it was relatively less pronounced for Hulu subscribers.

Within seconds, Hulu is armed with a data-driven persona to pitch to the automotive advertiser that recommends family-rated, period drama, or futuristic viewing.

Unlock More Possibilities with First-Party Data

The capabilities get even more powerful when you blend the best of third-party data with first-party data. By overlaying protected identifiers between two datasets in a cleanroom format, Affinio can detect overlaps and assess the combined characteristics of the intersecting group.

• Publishers like Hulu can then understand existing subscriber interests beyond known internal demographics and viewership patterns to further color Ad Sales pitches
• Hulu could overlay its actual subscribers and their viewing patterns with other Infutor files (e.g. Auto data) to uncover even more specific Ad Sales recommendations
• Advertisers like the automaker can learn which streaming providers their own customers actually use most in order to better focus their sponsored content investment

Focus on Behaviors

Analysis like this is possible without exposing raw data within the ecosystem, using capabilities of Snowflake’s Data Warehouse and Affinio’s tech. The use of overlapping probabilistic signals to identify prospects in a privacy-safe manner without exchanging raw PII is a path forward that is here to stay. Visit affinio.com to learn more about using Affinio’s various apps for addressing your audience intelligence needs.