NY Interconnect: Diverse Portfolio Approach to Media Buying Delivers a Strong ROI

The ability to place buys across multiple types of media and content choices in one system can yield striking results. "The buy rate of audiences that see the advertisement on linear and streaming ends up being more than double on every attribution study," said Jeffrey Starr, Digital Sales Manager at New York Interconnect (NYI). The company's Audience One platform builds campaigns to run across linear and streaming environments.

The importance of combining media in each buy reflects changes in consumer behavior. According to Statista, 70% of television viewers in the United States are using a second device while watching programming. In theory, if a target customer is not seeing an advertisement on their flat screen in the living room through linear television, they will see it on their tablet or phone, noted Starr.

It's kind of like having a diversified financial portfolio, he explained. Any good financial manager will encourage an investor to diversify, rather than invest in one or two stocks. In the long run, that leaves the investor less vulnerable to market volatility and more likely to receive a bigger return on their investment. With a diversified media buy, "you're not overexposing yourself to one position," Starr noted. "You're extending your reach and your exposure and getting a better ROI."

NYI data helps prove his point. As a baseline, consider that households exposed to an ad campaign via TV or digital resulted in an 80% incremental sales lift when compared to unexposed households. However, the exposed buy rate more than doubled when comparing households exposed to TV or digital with households exposed to both TV and digital. Thus, consumers exposed to the campaign via both mediums had an even higher conversion rate. In one particular report, a campaign utilizing both TV and digital yielded a $90 return on each dollar spent overall.

The one-stop buying experience that NYI provides takes the guesswork out of who's watching what, where and when by combining all the viewing options onto one buying system, Starr said. Those options include reaching on-demand, streaming and app users, as well as what Audience One considers to be traditionalists who are watching linear TV. This data-driven, multiscreen focus shifts the decision of what to buy, from specific programming to audience.

Auto advertisers are certainly reaping big rewards with this approach. And that's imperative, according to Starr. Even though supply chain issues have led to low inventory combined with an inflationary economy, people are still buying cars and will continue to do so in the future. Auto advertisers need to stay top of mind.

A key ingredient to satisfy automotive client needs is attribution studies. For example, Audience One is able to analyze a given campaign's results by using attribution studies that combine exposure files. It cross references anonymized information about who saw a given ad and when they saw it with public car-registration data. The system also tracks purchase rates and determines what the incremental lift was for the media buy. That information is then provided to the advertiser.

Solutions like the Audience One platform are another example of the industry trend away from the traditional cost-per-point method of buying television and toward a data-driven, audience-focused, impression-based approach. The goal is to reach an advertiser's target market wherever that person may be in their customer journey.

Starr's team focuses on both the regional and national media buys. "We try and help educate, and we build campaigns that will be successful on all our digital products," he noted.

A joint venture of Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast, the Audience One platform is unique to the New York Market. Its media options are available in more than 7.6 million households and to over 22 million consumers. The sheer size allows solutions like Audience Once to precision-target an audience while delivering reach, something that smaller markets can't do as effectively, Starr concluded.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.