Ampersand + Polk = Audiences in Overdrive for Automotive Marketers

The AND Platform leverages insights from nearly 40M million households and reaches 85M HH including 60 percent of those with addressable technology across 120 cable networks The 500 Polk Audiences recently added are in three categories current ownership loyalty and inmarket audiences and are further subdivided for every auto brand and nameplateWhat that means for advertisers is the end of expensive scattershot marketing that reaches a lot of people who will never buy the advertised car MediaVillage Zoomed with Marty Shelata senior vice president for automotive partnerships at Ampersand and Joe Kyriakoza vice president and general manager of Polk Automotive Solutions by IHS Markit to talk more about this new opportunityquotWe39re excited to work with Ampersand a company like ours that is thinking ahead of the curvequot said Kyriakoza quotTV has gone from a linear appointmentdriven medium to one totally controlled by the consumer who can choose to watch at different times and on different devices Ampersand connects the dots between the different providers and it39s a winwin for everybodyquotquotAmpersand has developed a harmonized set of settop box insights from our MVPD partners that measures viewership at the household levelquot Shelata said quotIt39s the largest source of deterministic viewership data availablequotWith that viewership data Shelata said quotWe can segment households by viewing behaviors as well as measure ad exposure When married with a powerful data set like Polk we can deliver relevant advertising to a target segment and then measure the actual outcome after that household was delivered the adquot In other words the company knows the content that is being consumed whether an ad was delivered and provide measurement on outcomes such as dealer visitation and purchase Auto advertisers can identify the segment of consumers with a midsize SUV lease ending in three months and target that segment with ads extolling their new SUV lineup The data is all aggregated and anonymized so no one39s privacy is compromised quotquotAt Polk we look at the automotive buyer universe all of the purchases that occur and their buying history and create models that tell us what consumers are likely to buy nextquot said Kyriakoza quotAnd we can look at data going back three decades did they buy a car every year or every 10 yearsquot If regional trends are in the data Polk and its Ampersand partner will be able to detail themThe automotive consumer is changing dramatically over time with COVID having both good and bad effects According to IHS Markit the worst of the pandemic is now behind the industry with sales recovery in the latter part of 2020 Consumers are worried about riding on public transit and low fuel costs are helping to yield incremental vehicle purchases And three million leases expired by the end of 2020 The industry is looking to meet demand with more than 100 new vehicle introductions and refreshes through 2021Automakers in the 1960s courted buyers with annual styling changes while the underlying platforms were little changed Today models stay on the market longer cars have more inherent longevity 200000 miles instead of about 75000 and so people hold on to them for longer periods quotThe average life of a vehicle is 12 years and people keep them an average of about six years if they buy them new seven if they bought usedquot said Kyriakoza quotThe industry has raised quality quite a bitquotStill today39s younger buyers are motivated as much by infotainment as styling and longevity quotTech is a major driverquot said Kyriakoza quotPeople want to know about Bluetooth availability and navigation and features like Alexa in the vehicle Five years ago it didn39t show up as a consideration in the dataquotSimilarly some years people put fuel economy at the top of their list of concerns and at other times like now it39s way down in the list As Americans flock to SUVs they39re also killing the market for fuelefficient small cars Automakers adjusted by adding SUVs to the lineup and changing their marketing pitches to suit Instead of cars pulling up to the opera house now they39re seen fording streams in the back countryAnd where once consumers stayed loyal to a brand for life you were a Ford or a Chevy buyer now they39re less loyal in some cases simply choosing the car with the most uptodate technology IHS said that some nine million consumers are ready to buy quotwithout strong loyalty to a specific brandquotquotReaching these 39nomads39 is critical to any vehicle launchquot Shelata said quotAs datadriven consultants we can help automakers find the conquests the potential buyers and grow their businessesquotMany more changes are afoot One is the pivot to buying online which has been hugely accelerated by COVID quotAuto dealers are the next frontier when it comes to this type of buyingquot said Kyriakoza quotIf you look at the Tesla site it39s very clean and easy to use That39s a step the rest of the market needs to take investing in tools to make the whole process more seamlessquot Customers are still largely buying on the showroom floor but they39re doing extensive homework first so the days of the salesman saying quotLet me show you folks the lineupquot are long gonequotThe ability to target ads very precisely does leave some things unchanged quotThe biggest brands are still going to want to sponsor ads at the Super Bowl and the Oscarsquot said Kyriakoza quotThey want the halo effect They39re likely to spend the same amount of money just distribute it differentlyquotThe message for automakers is that accurate highly specific data will be critical for the industry going forward both for large national advertising campaigns and much smaller spends on the dealer levelClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNetamp160

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Ampersand + Polk = Audiences in Overdrive for Automotive Marketers

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Jim Motavalli

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Ampersand + Polk = Audiences in Overdrive for Automotive Marketers

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