Editor’s Note - This story was originally published in February's Loyalty Management Online, and is part of Loyalty360’s “Best of 2016.” We wish you and your family a happy holidays, and will return to our regular content schedule in 2017!
When a medium becomes digital, it becomes addressable at the household level, and then it becomes a growth market for Acxiom. That is according to Rick Erwin, president and general manager of Acxiom Audience Solutions. Targeting personalized and digitized customer engagement is at the heart of the launch of Acxiom TV.
Acxiom, an analytics and software-as-a-service company, announced the launch of Acxiom TV during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month.
“The basic underlying trend is that all forms of advertising have been migrating to digital,” Erwin explained to Loyalty360. “TV is the most recent medium to digitize and become addressable at the household level. Then it becomes a growth market for Acxiom. The industry is at a tipping point now.”
Acxiom TV will allow TV partners to 1) research and plan cross-platform TV campaigns using precise audience data; 2) automate workflow to streamline segmentation, execution and reporting; and 3) activate segments across all TV platforms.
Acxiom, an $800 million 45-year-old company, has always helped brands connect to consumers and their customers.
“The company is still dead set on its original purpose,” Erwin explained. “Our mission has become making it safe and effective to activate audience segments everywhere. That’s a huge statement, but an important statement of our mission.”
Erwin believes that the TV industry is in desperate need of a scaled, uniform data grid to support advanced TV advertising.
“It’s about bringing advanced data-driven advertising technology to the TV industry,” he said. “Addressable TV is the notion of being able to target an individual ad to an individual household. More broadly, it’s using household level data to make smarter, more effective TV advertising.”
What factors prompted Acxiom TV?
“The notion of people-based, household-based marketing is well enough understood in TV to be an attractive improvement for many brands and advertisers,” Erwin said. “Five years ago, there was no people-based addressability of display advertising. That now has 50%-60% penetration. I think this will catch on with TV advertising. We’re not setting out to change anyone’s behaviors per se. We’re offering an alternative that can result in better advertising. It allows them a new tool to make programs more worthy of being bought or platform media more valuable.”
Erwin said he’s had tremendous immediate interest.
“We met with more than 30 TV distributors, network programmers, agencies, advertisers, and data companies,” he explained. “The interest was unanimously striking. The meetings were very productive. One thing that resonates strongly about this platform is it’s data neutral. We want to have a standard data grid available to everybody. The way that data plays into marketing platforms and customer engagement is through the point of engagement and context. If you can’t detect a customer and what they’re worth to you at a particular touch point, and make a strong prediction of what they want to see next, it won’t work.”
Acxiom TV will be a tool that can allow brands to apply customer engagement strategies from other channels to television.
“One that is ubiquitous is the notion of connectedness,” Erwin said. “I want to engage with a brand exactly where and when I want to on any device I want to and I expect brands to have figured out how to make that seamless. Similarly, consumers want the same ubiquitous process when they transact with brands, seek service or information. We believe our role in that is connectivity, making sure all the world’s individual marketing platforms and devices can connect to a uniformed data grid.”