By Etan Vlessing
TORONTO – Each June the Canadian fall upfront presentations traditionally allow broadcasters to sell advertisers on their returning hit dramas and comedies for broad mainstream audience reach.
While CTV’s virtual Homefront presentation on Tuesday was long on clips from returning hit shows like This is Us, Grey’s Anatomy, The Masked Singer and Amazing Race Canada, advertisers know Canadians increasingly stream their favourite TV shows and are devoting more dollars to digital media, search and social media platforms. Until recently, broadcasters have been hard-pressed to offer real-time ad outcome reporting for linear TV households.
So it was welcome news Tuesday as CTV tub-thumped for SAM, its proprietary strategic audience management tool, which has been upgraded to provide attribution for the first time in linear TV.
Put another way, SAM allows advertisers to measure linear TV’s impact on sales outcomes, not just buy time on popular shows like The Good Doctor, Young Sheldon and Station 19, while matching product exposure to sales outcomes via various demographic slices.
So advertisers, long after they’re wowed each June during the Canadian Upfronts by the glitz and glamour of new American dramas and comedies for Rogers, Corus and Bell bought during their annual Hollywood shopping expedition, can now for the rest of the year better buy audiences, and not just shows, using ad tech as a TV media-buying process (ad-tech was a key focus in the Rogers and Corus presentations, too).
“Bell Media is the first and only company in Canada to offer attribution this robust, because we’re the ones who invested in the technology linking TV exposure to website traffic at a household level,” Stewart Johnston, president of media sales, marketing and TSN told advertisers during the virtual presentation, tracking Bell TV, home Internet and wireless customer traffic, fully anonymized.
The data-driven ad sales tool signals Bell Media joining its American peers like WarnerMedia with its Xandr unit and Comcast with its own video ad server Freewheel in using wireless, broadband and pay-TV customer data to help advertisers buy and place marketing pitches as efficiently and targeted as digital media already allows.
The goal is to allow traditional broadcasters to respond to pandemic-accelerated shifts in consumer behavior to e-commerce giants like Amazon, and compete against digital ad giants like Facebook and Google as they allow more targeted and efficient sales outcomes for brand marketers.
“You can plan, purchase and measure TV campaigns fueled by real-time, first party data gathered from Bell’s set-top boxes, mobile and wireless activity, all through a user-friendly via a desktop platform,” Johnston said of SAM as a consumer-data measurement tool.
CTV will be hoping that’s music to the ears of Canadian advertisers who have either reduced or paused their ad spending in key consumer categories during the current economic downturn, or are seeking more granular and digital options to activate their pandemic-era campaigns.
“With so much changing in these past several months, every day feels like a week, and in this massive world of adjustments, it’s really reshaped how we live and work,” Bell Media president Randy Lennox said in welcoming advertisers buffeted by the Covid-19 crisis to his Homefront presentation.
And Johnston was upfront about Bell Media changing its ad sales process ahead of an uncertain 2020 primetime campaign. “We completely understand the uncertainty around the buying this fall,” he told advertisers.
Of course, Bell Media isn’t alone in hitching its future to the digitization of TV ad expenditures. Rival Corus Entertainment is still hoping Bell will also come on board its automated audience-based buying ad platform Cynch, which similarly allows data segmentation and claims to improve the reporting timeline for media buyers. Rogers has already committed to deploy Cynch.
To that competition, Bell Media’s Johnston insisted SAM “is the future of ad buying,” and to reinforce the point, promised wary advertisers flexible cancellation policies for ad buys, premiums waived on first-party data dives for SAM bookings, and guaranteed audience delivery in key demos using Numeris segments.
“We want all of you to reap the benefit of SAM right away,” he told advertisers.
