Driving Data for Agencies. Interview with Centriply

There are many data driven platform companies in the media ecosystem today and Centriply is one that concentrates its efforts on the agency side. Centriply is known predominantly as “a media agency first and foremost,” according to Rich Kaufman VP Business Development. 

The company operates in two sectors; 1. Technology and software for DMP planning analysis that facilitates local cable data driven planning and buying and 2. As a local cable media buying specialist for agencies. In that way, it could be said that they tend to compete with organizations such as the NCC for local cable ad inventory and dollars, but advocating from the agency side.

Kaufman explained that Centriply has “historically been hired by other agencies to wrestle with local cable. Today we go to the holding companies of agencies offering them capabilities that they may not have.” These companies include IPG entities from Cadreon to MAGNA to some non-media brands and with WPP primarily with Modi Media.

Shelley Stansfield, with the intriguing title of Director, Special Ops for Centriply, added that the company can get to the household address level to assisting these agencies with targeting more households in areas where other data sets may have less saturation or concentrations of the target consumer. “It’s not that the agency can’t buy local cable,” Kaufman explained, “The core point of our capability in our platform is that we have a window on all inventory on the MVPDs, rates from Nielsen local and custom segmentations from agencies as well as data from companies like Experian and Axciom  or proprietary audience data from marketers or their agencies.”

I sat down with both Kaufman and Stansfield and asked them the following questions:

Charlene Weisler: What are your definitions of TV?

Rich Kaufman: I believe there are two answers -What is it actually today and what is it going to be? Today it is 90% the same as it has always been. TV budgets are transacted in the traditional manner. Upfronts are as healthy as can be. Technology and data offer better targeting. Where will it all go? I see TV going away and replaced by video. Network TV, Cable, Digital Video, OTT, IP based insertion of 30 second spots, tablets and mobile will all be defined as video compression. Measurement and information will be based on a data target and it will continue to evolve quickly.

Shelly Stansfield: TV is a historic term that will be evolving into video. It is the delivery of entertainment, as a sit back moment to be entertained. I am happy to see the disruption of measurement because we have always been a data driven company.

Charlene Weisler: What data do you use and access?

Shelly Stansfield: We have access to a number of datasets to apply to both inventory and audiences such as Experian, Polk, Cambridge Analytica for psychography to drive TV plans, first party, CRM, loyalty cards to zipcode. We come from the political realm and have the measurement ability to go to the address level but we roll it up into zipcodes. You can append to the advertisers’ specific sources.

Charlene Weisler: Address level? What is your policy on privacy?

Shelly Stansfield: We use the HIPAA regulations for pharmaceutical advertising that has specific restrictions about how privacy works. The smallest group we target in a concentrated area is 25 and then we roll it up. We look at the sum total.

Charlene Weisler:  Who is in your competitive set?

Shelly Stansfield: I would say the spot departments at the agencies themselves. We can sometimes be viewed as threatening. We are like the Simulmedias of the world but we are different in that they take data and make inventory more valuable for sellers. We take data and identify more valuable inventory for agencies and advertisers.

Rich Kaufman: Sometimes we compete with other companies in the space for media solutions such as DSPs like Tubemogel or SSPs like Rubicon or Simulmedia or other direct aggregators like AdMore REVShare. If you are Cadreon, you can go in many directions. So we potentially compete with everything an agency can do in addition, as Shelly pointed out, the spot departments at the agencies.

Charlene Weisler: Looking ahead five years, what would you predict for the media landscape?

Rich Kaufman: There will be scaled ubiquitous IP based video measurement. All will be measured at the device level.

Shelly Stansfield: Everyone should fear Facebook. It will be a juggernaut. We placed something on it recently and wow – the reach is amazing.

 This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com