Nov 21, 2019

The Art and Science of Going Holistic in Addressable Advertising. An Interview with Cadent’s Rachel Herbstman


Image result for rachel herbstmanA lot has happened at Cadent over the past few months. For one thing, since our last discussion in April, Rachel Herbstman has been promoted to VP, Platform Analytics, Cadent Addressable from Director. For another thing, Cadent’s Addressable Platform has expanded and improved its capabilities. 

Adding Data Science and Automation to the Art of Media
Herbstman’s team has expanded over the past few months and includes experts in Data Science and Computer Science who partner with those with media backgrounds. “It’s a really great complementary approach and allows us to look at campaign analytics with different perspectives,” she explained and allows Cadent to “automate efficiencies and increase our overall productivity within the group.”

Perhaps the biggest change is the degree and type of automation that, in her words, informs the platform. According to Herbstman, “We can look at any visualization that slices and dices the data we receive, and because we are getting the data from the whole industry versus just one particular system or one particular type of media, we can learn a lot,” about the difference in advertising impact in different environments from VOD to Linear to OTT and across types of audiences. It is looking at data holistically to, “understand the actionable takeaways from all of the different dimensions.” Then, once the individual campaigns are analyzed, use this knowledge to help inform the entire category.
Cadent’s platform is an open ecosystem that can use, “any data set from any service. So if a client wants to use their own data, they can ingest that. If a client is more interested in prospecting, we can use their first party with any third party data and compare the difference between the two.” In this way an advertiser can ascertain the differences in audience behavior by platform.

How the Landscape Has Changed
Because Cadent is taking a holistic approach to addressable, they have a good view of the trends occurring in the media landscape and how different media types and messages resonate with different audiences by platform.  “So for instance, in a VOD environment, we may need less frequency to drive a conversion because the consumer is in an engaged, lean in, consuming media differently than watching a linear television show,” she explained. Being able to look at different cuts of data by audience, viewing environment, by creative length, is a great advantage and can lead to new insights into engagement and ad weight.

Reach is another area where having different datasets is valuable. There may be opportunities to add messaging later in a campaign to improve reach. According to Herbstman, “Maybe we layer on more messages in weeks four or five of a campaign when reach has plateaued so you can get new eyeballs and new impressions and pay less for that incremental consumer.”

Predicting Business Outcomes
Herbstman noted that one of the major efforts over the past few months has been the implementation of synergies within the company. “The analytics group has been working closely with the Products group and the Data Engineering teams and the Data Science teams,” she stated. This enables the company to leverage all of their historical data that has been received on a campaign by campaign basis to better understand the trends and form models to better predict future business outcomes. These models could also take into account things like seasonality and pod lengths.

“Our platform embraces the very best of all of the marketing tools,” Herbstman noted. “What we are able to do is understand, from a digital and a television perspective, how audiences are engaging in and consuming content. So from the onset of a campaign, instead of looking at addressability as a standalone tactic, we are talking to the agencies and advertisers to understand what their holistic campaign parameters are and how they are using other media tactics.” Holistic approaches are the wave of the future and Cadent is dedicated to being a frontrunner in that effort.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

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