Building Maximum Addressable Audiences
How CiG’s unique approach to data collection and validation builds addressable audiences and empowers ultimate campaign efficacy across media channels.
In a previous CiG Insights post, Why Geography Matters in a Digital First World, I discussed the importance of connecting customers’ digital IDs with their physical address, using postal codes as a common identifier across data attributes to build scalable campaigns.
Today, I’m going to continue the conversation with a deep dive into the unique ways CiG is actively compiling maximum addressable audiences for marketers.
What is an Addressable Audience?
This term simply refers to a select audience segment, which marketers can clearly identify and reach via a multitude of media channels based on a campaign’s specified target.
The Current Challenge
It has traditionally proven difficult to target the same audience(s); (people, groups of people, and households) precisely across multiple media channels at scale.
A paradox exists within the construction of truly scalable addressable audiences: there is an abundance of addressable databases available to marketers, but they’re often not connected by a common identifier and scalable across channels.
So, while marketers can define their audiences through data, they’re unable to connect with these audiences through multiple media channels both online and offline – rendering them not universally addressable.
So, what are we doing about it?
The intelligentVIEW platform was designed to specifically bring solutions to this challenge and offer marketers and advertisers the opportunity to connect with their desired audience base across media channels at scale.
How do we build addressable audiences?
There are three major facets to the solution we’ve built for the purpose of creating Canada’s largest addressable market:
#1 – To connect addressable audiences is to determine a reliable common identifier. The intelligentVIEW platform is unique in the sense that we leverage the six-digit postal code as a privacy compliant, geographically accurate, and stable common identifier across data attributes and media. By using the postal code as a common identifier, we’re able to connect mobile IDs to actual street addresses and postal codes, and then target those consumers across almost all media channels.
#2 – We have connected media activation within the platform that allows you to not only profile and understand an audience, but also activate them directly across media channels. I will be diving deeper into this aspect in my next article.
#3 – Underpinning all of this is the unique way we connect our data points to create these addressable audiences – this is the secret sauce!
The Secret Sauce Recipe
The intelligentVIEW platform aggregates an abundance of data sources regardless of vintage, size, geography, and frequency, and builds them into a single self-validating data ecosystem. This allows us to ensure our audiences are not only addressable, but current.
Beating the Data Time Lag:
Current data isn’t valuable unless it can be used currently!
Typically, there is an enormous time lag between raw data collection, modelling, projections, and when said data gets released via marketing insights and intelligence platforms. Marketers likely have access to audience building and segmentation tools that are updated yearly at best with data sources that were produced many months before they were available in the platform.
Traditionally, curating data takes a lot of time and adding this data to platforms takes even longer. So, marketing platforms will tout a new set of data for marketers to dive into, however the data is already at least a year to 18 months old by release time.
Our data team and developers have significantly reduced this time lag, allowing the intelligentVIEW platform to release brand new data within six hours of our quarterly core data and segmentation updates. An addressable market must be current to be effective and intelligentVIEW’s unique approach to data and platform integration has solved this.
Segmentation Flexibility
Some insights platforms rely on their segmentation system to connect media research panel data, such as Numeris and Vividata to the market. This overly simplistic approach assumes behaviours are consistent over very large groups of Canadians. However, the intelligentVIEW platform does not do this.
Valuable panel data are projected to postal codes independently of pre-defined segments. This allows for marketers who rely on our platform a choice of using intelligentSEGMENTS or their own segmentation. Media and behavioural profiles are more pronounced in intelligentVIEW and show differentiation, where previously they can be indistinguishable using segment linked approaches.
For example, in intelligentVIEW your customers that fall into segment C4-Deal Seekers in Toronto could have a media consumption profile that differs from the overall C4 segment media consumption profile in Toronto.
The Non-Purist Approach
Data validation is the key to determining the value of any data insights tool. Data needs to make sense, not just statistically, but in the context it is being applied. In our case, the context is understanding and targeting audiences for marketing and advertising.
The intelligentVIEW platform doesn’t rely on one standardized approach to building out the data – we look at all the options while cross validating every data point in the ecosystem we’ve built. It could be as scientific as building clusters to procedurally identify patterns within the data and check for outliers, to automated subjective validations, such as building a Google Streetview visual catalogue of houses in a price range to make sure what we’re seeing in the data matches what we’re seeing on the ground.
We also look at geospatial components and apply micro and macro processes so that the data makes sense when validated at the neighbourhood and market levels. Since the data are all interconnected with multiple cross validations, the data ultimately makes sense for marketers.
Building Audiences to Empower Marketers for Success
Ultimately, our approach to data is what allows us to continue to reach our goal of building Canada’s largest universally addressable audiences. The intelligentVIEW platform has been designed to provide a constant influx of up to date, cross-validated data insights that can be connected to any media channel the marketers choose.
In my next article, I will dive into the features of intelligentVIEW that allow marketers to connect media to target audiences and engage with the exact same people across an array of advertising channels.
Tim Leys
Partner - Consumer Intelligence Group Inc.