Through a new partnership with linear TV ad platform Simulmedia and offline-to-digital data connector LiveRamp, advertisers can tie their TV advertising to online measurement more seamlessly.
Brands including Home Depot, Choice Hotels, GoDaddy and Zicam run TV campaigns with Simulmedia, which combines TV viewing behavior with transactional credit card data to target TV audiences on a household level and directly measure whether those ads led to actual purchases. Many of the company's clients also have worked with Acxiom-owned LiveRamp to turn their offline CRM, loyalty and other proprietary data into information that can be used to target their audiences in digital media, and measure whether their TV spots prompted people to take actions online.
"Clients would like it to be faster, easier and more automated," said Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan. "Most of them have a data relationship already with LiveRamp so they already have a lot of segments there."
LiveRamp has been on a rapid-fire mission to foster partnerships with all sorts of data providers in recent months, arguably in the hopes of creating such a broad set of data connections that advertisers cannot risk not working with the firm. So it seems only natural when Mr. Morgan spotted Acxiom CEO Scott Howe in the halls of the massive CES show in January, the meeting of the two digital ad veterans led to talk of what would become this latest data hookup.
Television advertisers and the industry as a whole, said Mr. Morgan, "are now ready to start acting a lot more like digital."
Through the better-synced systems, Simulmedia client Choice Hotels and its media agency Havas can streamline measurement of the TV spots it targets using its proprietary loyalty program or credit card purchase data, more readily seeing whether households that were served TV ads took a digital action.
Simulmedia has household level data on around 20 million people from cable companies and set-top box companies such as Tivo. Its platform does not access personally identifiable information, said Mr. Morgan.
Last month, LiveRamp partnered with Tru Optik, an over-the-top TV and connected-TV firm, allowing brands to onboard their first-party email, CRM and other data to target their customers in smart TVs, connected devices, gaming consoles and OTT systems.
LiveRamp also recently announced a partnership with Freckle IoT, which gathers mobile device proximity information from beacon data providers and directly through app and publisher partners. The deal makes the firm's audience segments available in LiveRamp's identity resolution system, IdentityLink, which gives brands a cohesive view of a consumer based on cross-channel data from multiple sources.
