MultiScreen TV Buyers Can Overcome Market Challenges According to DeepIntent’s John Mangano

For multiscreen TV buyers, the current television landscape presents more than a few challenges. As viewers increasingly consume content across an increasingly varied set of platforms, the issue of metrics and measurement looms large.  John Mangano, DeepIntent’s Senior Vice President of Analytics offers some advice.

The problem, according to Mangano, “is the way we are buying it, transacting and ultimately measuring TV. Historically, buying and measurement from the 1950s to now hasn't really changed. It’s still tied to GRPs.” For Mangano, that misses a great deal of opportunities for both marketers and viewers. “It was something that was fine for many decades, but today it feels very prehistoric,” he asserted.

“Historically, the GRP was based off of reach and frequency. We didn't really have the ability to go much further. Now we target one to one in the majority of cases. The measurement also needs to be on a one to one basis as well,” he noted. Mangano explained that a campaign can have, “massive frequency and reach very few people or you can reach a lot of people and have very low frequency.” But now we have the ability to be very specific in how we identify viewers and aggregate them, beyond the usual demographics, to include very specific buying inclinations and motivations. Measurement must be able to keep up with the marketplace. “You need to get to the next level, which is a profile of who you're reaching so you know you're reaching the right targets,” he added.

DeepIntent’s focus is on the health sector and here, the value and importance of one to one targeting is paramount. “If we're reaching a lot of men and it's a health condition that only affects women it's not good. Because we're a DSP, the foundation of what we do is retargeting one to one. The DSP is the backbone of how the Internet serves ads,” he noted. And, with the addition of CTV, “television is now moving into a platform that is has the kind of accuracy that digital ads have had for years.” This now enables TV in the form of CTV to have the same level of targetability as there currently is in digital.

For viewers, the experience is seamless. He explained that, “We've done research and found that TV viewers have no idea whether they're watching CTV or regular TV. They're just watching TV and they're getting served ads.” He also shared that these viewers are okay with ads, understanding that advertising is the foundation of TV content funding. All of this enables companies like DeepIntent to not only target but also quantify very specifically who they are reaching.

In an era of one to one targeting, privacy is a huge priority. “There are two levels of privacy. One is legal, which is a top priority of ours. The other is ethical,” he stated.  Sometimes you can adhere to legal standards of privacy but the ethically, it may be a no go. This is especially true in medical advertising. “The key thing we always do is we never use health information for one to one. We build models that help us find people more likely, but the reality of it is not based off of anyone's individual health information,” he assured. The data from the served ads is aggregated and anonymized which gives Mangano the ability to measure, “the rate at which you reach the right patients or the people who are exposed and took specific actions. But we'll never know which one of the million people actually were the ones.”

DeepIntent is also able to parse, “How frequently we reach individuals and on what platforms. That platform could be TV versus mobile phone versus desktop, and it also could be app or channel for which you have been exposed. All that gives us the ability to have a full picture of the media campaign itself,” he noted. In addition, the data is also placed in an analytics engine which delineates specifically what different combinations of exposures drove action. “And because we also market to physicians, we also do analysis where we identify the patients who went to the doctors,” as a result of seeing the campaign.

“With our CTV analyses compared to linear TV, we are typically seeing an increase in the ability to find the right patients using CTV over linear TV as well as seeing higher rates of treatment,” he explained. There are huge benefits in finding the right patients for a medication, “because you're impacting more people for every marketing dollar spend and that ultimately means healthier people, living longer happier lives,” he added.

The past is not necessarily prologue for the future of pharma advertising. “When I first started in the health analytics industry 15 years ago, I spent a lot of my time trying to help pharma understand the internet space and market it. A lot has changed in terms of more advanced marketing and the industry has changed too. There is a lot more focus on privacy and other laws,” he explained.

Since the pandemic, which has normalized telemedicine while at the same time caused some people to delay treatments, the call for better and more individualized treatments has never been greater.  “The pharma industry has realized that digitally there are many ways to reach both doctors and patients and they're leveraging that more than ever. We're starting to see behavior changes that support more digitally focused communications and interactions. For us at DeepIntent, our ability to deliver the messages, whether to patients or doctors, creates efficiencies that weren't there five years ago,” he concluded.

 This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

 

 

 

DTC Advertising: Finding the Right Prescription

Direct to Consumer (DTC) pharma advertising has its advocates and its detractors. Some believe that it puts valuable medical information in the hands of consumers while others believe that it has a controversial underside, doing less to protect patients and more to spur sales. For planners in the DTC advertising space, a data-driven approach to the media decision-making process is imperative. Planners need to understand what opportunities are available for hyper targeting and in what advanced solutions they should invest as complements to the modern mix.

Targeting the right consumers with DTC advertising while protecting privacy can be achieved with a combination of different PII datasets and followed by a careful crafting of audience segmentations that combine both broadcast and cable. Some companies, like television media solutions company Cadent, use a blind match process through third party partners like Experian which combines anonymized subscriber data with other personal attributes such as purchase data or prescription data. This data is then ingested into their platform to create more efficient buys for their pharma clients.

"Cadent's pharma business has grown dramatically, especially in this past Upfront and we expect it to be a category of tremendous growth for us, in part because of our ability to use data-driven media plans for our clients," said Jim Tricarico, CRO of Cadent Network. "Our pharma advertisers have seen great results by using a combination of data-enabled plans alongside national reach campaigns, across both cable and broadcast, to reach their audiences at different points of the purchase funnel."

One of Cadent's data partners, TiVo, uses direct match. According to Bill Harvey of Bill Harvey Consulting, "The direct HIPAA-certified match is (in my opinion) the best of breed privacy protected pharma solution out there. Unlike solutions involving degrees of fusion and lookalikes, it's all direct match. Unlike the other solutions, it works both for post evaluation analytics of ROI and its leverageable components, and also for pre-buy and in-flight optimization for TV and digital."

"When HIPAA regulations prevent a 1-to-1 addressable solution, there is an option to add another layer of TV impressions that don't jump right to the traditional TV DMA," said Shelley Stansfield, Director Special Ops at demand-side targeted TV platform Centriply. "Rolling up audience counts with a certain condition to the zip, county or a custom region can preserve privacy while still achieving efficiency in TV media delivery by finding areas of high concentration across the country."

Targeting to the individual can easily be achieved in digital, especially mobile, making it a seemingly desirable medium for DTC advertisers. Digital's capability to hyper target, however, may skirt the boundaries of privacy. "In regard to privacy concerns on hyper-targeting patients, I see this in online ads targeted based on the patient's Internet searches," explained Dr. Bruce Rector of Rector Consulting and Doctors for America.
There is a regulatory reason for data hyper-vigilance in DTC advertising. The FDA's Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) has, according to their website, "an active research program designed to investigate applied and theoretical issues of relevance to direct-to-consumer (DTC) and professional promotional prescription drug materials. OPDP's research supports the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) goal of science-based policy while maintaining its commitment to protect the public health."

According to Kantar Media, pharma spending on direct-to-consumer advertising in 2015 totaled $5.4 billion in 2015 compared to $4.3 billion in 2014. Not only was this a +19% year-to-year increase, it also equaled the high mark of $5.4 billion spent in 2006. Growth in DTC spending can be explained by the number of new FDA–approved drugs on the market, patent expiration and more competition in the market. These factors are generally trackable in the short term.

Share of spend is more revealing. While digital advertising for a range of consumer products and services is accelerating often at the expense of TV, the opposite is true for pharma. "Since 2011, the portion of DTC spending on TV has increased from 55% to 69%," according to the Pharmaguy at Pharma Marketing blog. In 2015, Pfizer allocated nearly 30% of its billion-dollar budget to network television while Novartis spent nearly half of its budget in cable.

Investments in television can also be explained by an older target demo. According to the latest Nielsen Total Audience Report, adults age 50+ spend the most hours with television a week. The Pharmaguy adds, "as pharma focuses more and more on drugs that treat diseases of old age such as Alzheimer's, it's to be expected that more and more of the industry's advertising budget is devoted to TV."
For DTC advertisers and planners, understanding how to unlock the full potential of television advertising requires an awareness of the data and solutions in market, not only because of the FDA but because the future demands it.

As Shelley Stansfield noted, "We were recently at a data conference and it was predicted that medical data collection is the next breakthrough arena for data mining and advancement. Disease states measured at the hospital level, clinic or office level provides trending data for predictive analytics. It was generally agreed that when predictive and cogitative data applications can drive awareness in media to both professional circles and consumers everyone will benefit."

This article first appeared on www.MediaBizBloggers.com