Nationalizing STB Data Driven Sales – The Cablevision and Fourthwall Partnership

With all of the data initiatives out there, I am personally drawn to Cablevision’s whose STB data represents the largest and most diverse DMA in the country.  Currently weighing in at 2.6 million homes and 7.2 million STBs, it covers linear, live and VOD tuning. So it was with great interest that I sat down with Paul Haddad, SVP and GM, Advanced Data Analytics, Cablevision Media Sales and Bill Feininger, President, Fourthwall, to discuss their recent partnership and how Cablevision data insights could be incorporated into a more national footprint.

Cablevision has developed two types of portfolios using data. The first is for the advertising arm of Cablevision Media Sales to help sell audience for impressions based campaigns. The other is, according to Paul, “a standalone system for programmers who do business with Cablevision. This portfolio helps them with analytics services which include in-depth program analysis by specific segments, advanced research of the effectiveness and the health of their programming and campaigns they ran locally or nationally, and audience reach and frequency by relevant segments.” In the past this analysis would be solely in the Cablevision coverage area but now with the addition of Fourthwall data, it enables analysis beyond the footprint.

I was curious as to why Cablevision would choose Fourthwall as a partner. Paul explained, “We did an evaluation of different datasets and were seeking an unbiased party that was pure in its offering. Other datasets, such as those from other MVPDs and SmartTVs were biased, in our opinion, because they were from only one source. We too are considered a biased source being an MVPD. We wanted purity and neutrality of the data collection and quality and there was only one – Fourthwall – where we liked the representativeness of the Fourthwall markets given that it aligns well with where we want to go. We wanted markets across the country to analyze and understand the nuances of Television viewership across these markets. We also wanted Live and DVR data combined given that a lot of valuable insights can be provided by analyzing and understanding the shift of audiences between these two mediums. Other datasets have either Live and VOD, but not DVR.” 

The key applications for this partnership are:

          Audience Based Media Planning for brands or programmers with national media plans based on audiences with expanded attributes beyond age and gender. It is possible to create segmentations and receive plans that they can then execute. 

   Programming Conversion Analysis looking at the relationship between live and DVR viewing, reach and frequency, household that might have viewed last year versus this year and the conversion of the targeted audience after the campaign.

           Audience Analysis looking at loyal viewers and how their viewing has evolved in the current season. Did they move from linear to DVR, for example, and the programs audience analytics. 

                 National Advertising Analytics where campaigns are run with the use of extended datasets to measure conversion to specific audiences reached. 

From Fourthwall’s perspective, Bill explained that, “FourthWall Media serves the industry as a data provider and also provides the keys to link 1st and 3rd party data.  These patent-pending techniques allow our clients to go from traditional age/gender targeting to purchase behaviors, loyalty card members’ viewership, etc.  The intent is to be able to find very specific audience segments.  Our dataset and matching services make this happen.”

It is my personal hope that the industry moves from silo’ed proprietary data solutions to something that can be syndicate-able and delivers powerful insights and analytics. Paul agreed and said, “We are focused on building an open and advanced analytics platform using first party and census-level MVPD data to help evolve the legacy TV measurement methodologies. Such an offering is desperately needed by programmers and advertisers today so they can understand the dynamics that are impacting their marketing, programming, and ad sales initiatives, and to make better decisions that can help them compete with the analytics-savvy competitors. Our goal is to also help evolve the research function - that currently uses sample or hybrid data models - to a powerful analytics function using census level data sets and advance analytics platforms. By joining with Fourthwall, we are implementing our plan to do this at scale and we support bringing more companies into our model as we find additional quality data sets.”

I am personally optimistic.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com