By Aleck Schleider, VP, Vertical Development

Earlier this year Videology announced a new partnership with Polk and Datalogix, which allows us to offer auto advertisers the most comprehensive set of audience targeting products in the market. These products allow video advertisers to leverage Polk data, at the local, regional, and national level to target precise auto consumer segments at scale. Then, taking it one step further, we can anonymously measure online ad exposure to offline sales. This ability to tie attribute online video ads to offline automotive sales, and subsequently its long-term impact on how brands market their vehicles, is game changing.

For the past few months, I have been out in the market speaking to auto advertisers and their agencies about this new product, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. And why wouldn’t it be? According to Kantar, automotive marketers spend more than $13 billion in measured media annually, with 50-60% of those dollars going toward television.  While no one is arguing television’s ability to build brands and raise awareness, the prospect of complementing television with a medium that brings greater addressability and accountability to their media spend represents a huge opportunity to improve ROI. 

Specifically, here’s what the advertisers we’ve spoken with are most excited about:

1. The ability to anonymously target “in market” buyers at scale using in-stream video. Whether based on past purchase behavior using Polk data (i.e., a consumer bought their last compact car 3 years ago, and the typical buying cycle for new cars is every three years), or current on-line behavior from data providers like BlueKai and Exelate (i.e. a consumer is searching car sites), we can target those consumers most likely to be in the auto buying cycle.

2. No waste targeting via Videology “hot spots.” Using Polk data, we can target those zip codes with the highest concentration of a given target (e.g. luxury car owners, Toyota owners, F-150 owners), and serve ads only to consumers within these zip codes. For the first time in digital media, these “hot spots” provide auto marketers the opportunity to eliminate waste, while achieving scale against a precise consumer segment.    And in addition to using these “hot spots” across in-stream online video, they can also be applied to in-stream mobile video.

3. Finally, our ability to attribute online video exposure to offline automotive sales.  This not only provides a view into the effectiveness of a campaign against offline automotive purchases, but also allows marketers to understand what is really working when using online in-stream video as a marketing platform.  Did the ads drive sales of their car or a competitor’s car and a host of other insightful metrics and learnings that can be applied to future campaigns.

The development of such a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for one of the largest spending advertising categories will accelerate our learnings about video’s abilities to drive ROI, as well as its ability to marry the brand building capabilities of television with the increased accountability of digital media.  We look forward to sharing more of these finding with the industry shortly.