Nationalizing STB Data Driven Sales: The Cablevision and FourthWall Partnership

Cablevision has developed two types of portfolios using data. The first is for the advertising arm of Cablevision Media Sales to help sell audience and impressions-based campaigns. The other is, according to Haddad, “a standalone data analytics service for programmers who do business with Cablevision. This portfolio helps them obtain granular audience insights, including in-depth program analysis by specific viewer segments, advanced research of the effectiveness and the health of their programming and optimization services for tune-in campaigns that run locally or nationally, and audience reach and frequency by relevant segments.”

In the past this analysis would be solely in the Cablevision coverage area, but now with the addition of FourthWall data it enables analysis beyond the footprint.

I was curious as to why Cablevision would choose FourthWall as a partner. “We did an evaluation of different datasets and were seeking an unbiased party with data available on a census basis,” Haddad explained. “Other datasets, such as those from other MVPDs and smart TVs are bias and somewhat incomplete. We also wanted purity of data collection and quality and there was only one [option] -- FourthWall -- which maintained data that was representative of the expanded markets nationally we were seeking. This data, combined with total audience data from Cablevision, gives us the ability to analyze and understand the nuances of television viewership for our programming partners across multiple markets in a single, unified way. We also wanted live and DVR data combined, given that a lot of valuable insights can be provided by analyzing and understanding the shift of audiences between these two mediums. Other datasets have either live and VOD, but not DVR.”

The key applications for this partnership are:

Audience Based Media Planning for brands or programmers with national media plans based on audiences with expanded attributes beyond age and gender. It is possible to create segmentations and receive plans that they can then execute.

Programming Conversion Analysis looking at the relationship between live and DVR viewing, reach and frequency, household that might have viewed last year versus this year, and the conversion of the targeted audience after the campaign.

Audience Analysis looking at loyal viewers and how their viewing has evolved in the current season. Did they move from linear to DVR, for example, and the programs audience analytics.

National Advertising Analytics where campaigns are run with the use of extended datasets to measure conversion to specific audiences reached.

What is FourthWall’s perspective? “FourthWall Media serves the industry as a data provider and also provides the keys to link first and third party data,” Feininger said. “These patent-pending techniques allow our clients to go from traditional age/gender targeting to purchase behaviors, loyalty card members’ viewership, etc.  The intent is to be able to find very specific audience segments.  Our dataset and matching services make this happen.”

It is my personal hope that the industry moves from siloed proprietary data solutions to something that can be syndicated and delivers powerful insights and analytics. Haddad agrees. “We are focused on building an open and advanced analytics platform using first party and census-level MVPD data to help evolve the legacy TV measurement methodologies,” he said. “Such an offering is desperately needed by programmers and advertisers today so they can understand the dynamics that are impacting their marketing, programming and ad sales initiatives, and to make better decisions that can help them compete with the analytics-savvy competitors. Our goal is to also help evolve the research function that currently uses sample or hybrid data models to a powerful analytics function using census-level data sets and advance analytics platforms. By leveraging Fourthwall data, we are implementing our plan to do this on a broader national basis.”

I am personally optimistic.

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