Applying Digital Data to Broadcast. Sinclair’s Creative Data Initiatives Revealed at the Secret Society

Mitch Oscar USIM’s Director, Advanced Television is all about collaboration and sharing of great ideas. His ever expanding Secret Society was created to forward the discussion of data driven solutions by media companies. The June 2016 meeting, held at comScore / Rentrak offices, highlighted those data initiatives that pushed the uses of digital data sets and their insights into traditional media platforms.  

The four presenters were:

       1.       Sinclair Broadcasting used programmatic techniques to insure the delivery of its primary audience guarantee and concurrently improve the aggregation of its client’s equally important secondary target.

       2.       iHeartRadio stressed the emergence of its capability to apply the precision, data and insights of digital and social to broadcast.

       3.       4Cinsights socialization provided Coca-Cola with a better understanding of how it could reach its unique target.

       4.       Roku demonstrated the value of the exploitation of timely registration information of its OTT/ cord cutting/ cord-nevers growing subscription population.

Sinclair – Applying Digital Insights to Buy Broadcast

Sinclair Broadcast is one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country, with 172 stations in 81 markets. Besides being the largest owner/operator of TV Stations, the company also owns The Tennis Channel cable network, American Sports Network and Ring of Honor Wrestling. Its network ad sales team worked with Russell Zingale, USIM Eastern President, and a client to provide a roadmap to buy a footprint by utilizing programmatic tactics.

Their initiative, called “Equitable Distribution versus Equitable Optimization” referenced the usage of data to place commercial spots every week in breaks that maintain the delivery of the primary demo (Adults 25-54) while also providing lift via a secondary demo ( less than $30k HH income).  To do this, Sinclair combined their footprint with Tribune to get nationalized distribution (+75%) for the USIM client (who was not revealed in the presentation). The two station groups together were then able to capture network allocated budgets and the deal was guaranteed on comScore/Rentrak deliveries, “the first time comScore/Rentrak data was used as the primary currency for a national broadcast campaign,” according to Oscar.

Stephen Spencer provided a more detailed summary of the management of the schedule and the results. He explained, “To achieve a schedule and a guarantee, it’s common to do an impartial but otherwise arbitrary rotation. We referred to as equitable distribution which is based on rotation of commercials within a program pod as well as pods within a program applying the precision, data, and insights of digital and social to broadcast. This time, we did a rotation that was still impartial on the underlying age-and-gender-based primary demo, but within that, we cherry-picked on the secondary demo, which in this case was based on income. It took some doing on the math, and this is just an experiment with only directional results, but it looks good. We thought the cherry-picking would raise our index from basically flat to as much as 15 or 25 percent, it actually ended up around 30 percent on average.”

Conclusion

The boundaries of what we can discover by using data creatively are now being pushed by new troves of first party data. The future, according to Zingale and Oscar, is very exciting. “During the Secret Society clandestine gathering, we were able to bring together for presentation purposes four distinct platforms that demonstrated a unique utilization of data,” Oscar explained. “Those were first party, third party, social and registration coupled with viewing and listening measurement,” he added.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
 

Sinclair Reveals National Capabilities and Data Insights

Sinclair Broadcast Group recently completed a groundbreaking study as part of a US International Media’s Secret Society initiative pairing Sinclair and Tribune stations and using Nielsen and comScore/Rentrak measurements. This study had a clear purpose - Sinclair wanted the ability to attract more national dollars into local and, by using data, enhance the value of their inventory for these national clients.

The project, presided over by USIM’s Director, Advanced Television, Mitch Oscar, convened as a “Data-ist” subgroup this past week to explore the initiative. “We always want to fly visibly under the radar and find the next trends,” posited Mitch. The results, presented by Stephen Spencer, Sr. Financial Analyst, Sinclair Broadcast Group, proved that not only was it possibly to roll up a programmatic buy into a nationalized footprint, it was also possible to measure it, with de-duped data, at a level that offers greater granularity, larger, more stable population sizes for niche targets and less data volatility.

Russell Zingale, President, Eastern Region, USIM, outlined the approach, “We were able to put two stations groups together with Sinclair’s help and take national money and move it more efficiently into local impact. Further, we wanted to be able to use a comScore/Rentrak guarantee to see what we could learn vis a vis Nielsen. This was helpful for our clients and a learning experience for the industry. We wanted to maintain our impression guarantee on our primary demo age and gender but also utilize the behavioral aspects of the consumer target to deliver more in the secondary target without hurting the primary target.”

Going National Programmatic

The first step in a national campaign is to be able to advertise to a national footprint. USIM was interested in working with Sinclair, whose footprint is not quite as national as what was needed - 40% of the country. But in partnership with Tribune stations, the usable footprint expanded to 80% of the country, about the reach of most cable networks. With a nationalized footprint having been achieved and a target audience of downscale Adults 25-54 identified, the next step was to examine the potential results of a campaign using comScore/Rentrak data and Nielsen data.

Maximizing Panel Size

Data has become central to the new technological sales process but the Secret Society has revealed challenges with the data that have previously not been discussed publically. One is the large issue of data duplication that was presented in the previous meeting . For this data sub-group meeting, data stability and volatility was explored. 

Stephen outlined the reasoning for comparing Nielsen to comScore/Rentrak, “We compared panel size for both Nielsen and comScore/Rentrak to establish a baseline to examine stability and granularity of the reported viewing. In the three markets we selected, panel size difference was meaningful: Washington (165,000 homes/comScore vs. 800/Nielsen), Cincinnati (41,200/ comScore vs. 500/Nielsen) and Little Rock (91,700 comScore/ 300/Nielsen). In our opinion the larger the panel penetration in the market correlated to the more stable the reported viewing. We saw less hills and valleys on programs that aired during the same time period across the week.” 

Increasing Data Stability

The three markets in the January 2016 buy represented the three different Nielsen data collection methods. Washington is measured by people meter, Cincinnati is measured by household meter and Little Rock is measured by diary. Campaign deliveries from these three markets with their three different Nielsen collection methods were compared to each market’s STB data, collected from comScore/Remtrak.   The target was a25-54 with incomes below $30k. As Jonathan Spaet, VP Network Sales and Development, Sinclair, explained, “Our retail client wanted to use adults 25-54 in early morning, daytime and fringe in an equitable distribution and equitable rotation. We came up with a schedule and ran the exact same ads on Sinclair and Tribune and analyzed the first week of the schedule using both data sets.”

The results - In the larger markets there was less difference in delivery between the two measurement services but as Nielsen measurement sample size decreased, there was more volatility and bounce, resulting in larger differences in delivery compared to the STB data. The concerns of the agency were flow stability, consistency and granularity (which included how to best combine the three data collections of Nielsen people meter, household meter and diary) and the fair comparison to comScore/Rentrak STB data. This was all achieved. “The biggest issue we have is post buys and stewardship” stated Steve Lanzano, President of the TVB.

Conclusion

Russell concluded, “We need a standard that we can plan against. Agencies have limited resources and we can post on many different metrics. There has to be one way to test and see how it goes and track calls we are getting for our client. We decided to measure our buy on comScore / Rentrak grps which for us had more stability, to see how it drove the business.”

For Steve Pruett, Chief Operating Officer, Sinclair TV Group, this initiative was an excellent first step. “As a result of this project, Sinclair and Tribune will continue to work together to expand our relationship in order to pursue network and programmatic dollars," he stated.


This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com