DISH Media's Camille Pickren on Navigating Data in the Blended Linear and Addressable Landscape

"As a team, we are in charge of all of the propensity modeling. So, if an advertiser decides, 'This is the kind of audience we want to reach,' we run models based on those who match the intended audience request and score all of our households to identify who is most likely to be in their target audience," she explains. Her team also provides direct targeting and various custom post-campaign reports for linear and addressable.

One of the challenges in media is that no matter how much an advertiser spends in a linear campaign, they typically max out at reaching around 50 percent of the audience, leaving a substantial audience still to be exposed to the messaging with the right amount of frequency. This is where Pickren taps into DISH Media's new Reach Booster product, to extend reach and attain optimal frequency. Reach Booster analyzes how a campaign performs in linear and then directs addressable ads to those homes that missed the linear messaging.

"The idea was to find everybody [in a linear schedule] who had seen a specific ad and then target those who didn't," Pickren says. "We've run several beta campaigns at this point, and they've been really successful reaching people who are not seeing the linear campaigns," she adds. Using Reach Booster, Pickren and her team have helped clients dramatically increase reach.

Finding the Best Data Points

In a world awash with granular first-party data, advertisers are faced with weighing which sets are best for a particular sales campaign: "There are so many datasets that it's a little overwhelming," she says. "People tend to stick with the traditional ways that linear was designed. They often start with an age and gender target in mind, but I have seen that slowly starting to shift as more sophisticated data becomes available."

Given the rich first-party data DISH has to offer, its ability to help advertisers drill deeper leads to far better advanced targeting. A recent request from an advertiser of farming equipment, for example, started as "men 18–45" and expanded to "men 18–45 who make over $75k and also own more than an acre of land." The latter resulted in an adequate sample size of 200,000 households. This highly targeted data approach ensures that there is as little waste as possible.

Ensuring Privacy

In today's data-driven world, consumer privacy is becoming increasingly important, especially for the DISH Media team. "We are very protective of our data," Pickren says. "Privacy is a big focus for DISH as a whole, and we've worked hard to put processes in place for targeted ad privacy."

This focus on privacy is a big benefit to advertisers. None of the data points that Pickren can access, for instance, are connected to a name or an address. It is all anonymized.

Education and Communication

Balancing external and internal constituencies is both an art and a data science for Pickren. In addition to external informational and sales efforts, DISH also focuses internally, educating its sales executives on all of the different choices of data available and how advertisers can best use its data for an advertising campaign. "We have a lot of new people coming into the company and it takes time to educate and train them," she explains. It's well worth the investment, as sales executives can then best communicate the breadth, security, and value of DISH's data.

DISH's clear respect for customers' data privacy, coupled with both linear and addressable advertising opportunities, means the media company is a rewarding option for advertisers.

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