That is the view of one ad agency exec searching for technology to reduce the frequency of ads.

They key, says Tim Spengler, the president of Dentsu Aegis Network’s M1 US, is to know enough about viewers that they are not exposed to the same ad multiple times over.

“There’s too many ads, and there’s too much frequency,” Spengler says.

“(It’s a) golden age of television from a content standpoint, but probably not from a viewer experience standpoint when it comes to the ad part of it.

“They expect more than they’ve ever expected before so we got to get relevance right. We’ve got to get the right ad to the right person and know how many times that person’s seen that ad and on how many platforms.

“Consumers today expect that relevance and if they don’t get it from brands because, ‘I’ve seen that at eight times a day, three times on my iPad, twice on my TV, and four times on my phone’ … then you don’t get me.”

M1 platform was developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes.

This video is from a series leading up to, and covering, the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara.  This Beet.TV series is sponsored by Xandr.   Please visit this page to find more videos from the series. 

Since gaining, keeping and growing customers involve different phases, being able to discern them leads to knowing what messaging to deliver across platforms. “Linking those two things up we think is the next phase of where the business is going,” Spengler opines in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019. “It’s data, but then you have to know what to say and it’s creativity.”

Powering much of this progress within Dentsu is the M1 platform developed by the Merkle agency prior to its acquisition by Dentsu in 2016. M1 now has an identity graph that comprises 95% of U.S. adults by way of personally identifiable information codes, according to Spengler.

“That gives us a tremendous ability to work with our clients to identify true targets based on all the data they would want to know about somebody,” and then to figure out “how to connect them at various end points so we can actually speak to those exact people. So it’s making media more precise and more powerful.”

Part of the process is connecting audiences with media owners. “The conversation we’re having is about audiences, it’s less about GRP’s,” Spengler says. “It’s about content and environment, because content and context will always be important. We’re coming together on that.”

Understanding the differences among audiences goes hand in hand with being able to determine how specific targets are consuming media, according to Spengler.

“You’ve got five different devices. Am I going to waste money and talk to you five different times when I only want to talk to you once? So you’ve got to really understand who you are and what device you’re on so we’re not wasting the money.”

Asked about the value that media agencies need to provide, Spengler says “It’s very complex. It used to be strategy and save me money.” Now its data, technology and creativity working together.

“It’s higher level work but that’s what our clients need and that’s what we’re trying to build ourselves to be able to deliver.”

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

Dentsu Aegis has gone full throttle on its custom platform, M1, the most recent data integration being with IRI. As announced early last month, M1 will now allow custom audience creation utilizing IRI Verified Audiences and/or IRI ProScores audiences linked to first- and/or third-party data.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Laurenzo explains why he is bullish on current and emerging data sources like automatic content recognition.

“Audience buying is definitely where we want to get to as an industry. Anybody you speak to on both sides of the desk would probably say our reliance on age and gender demographics for transactional purposes is really outdated,” Laurenzo says. “We have all this data that can tell us who’s watching what content, why can’t we transact on those more granular targets?”

Agencies are still “very much held accountable” to segments like adults 18-49 and the price at which they can transact for gross rating points. “It’s ‘as long as you get me this price on this demographic then you’re doing okay’ versus I want you to buy the audience that we need to hit and then if that audience then goes and makes some sort of action.”

Laurenzo says there’s no shortage of audience-based television advertising inventory in the marketplace. “Every network group has their own audience-based platforms that we can leverage and they’re making a lot of inventory available through those platforms.”

The question is what’s the right data to use and when would you use it, according to Laurenzo.

“There are a lot of partners now with ACR technology and I think that’s great,” he says, citing Vizio, Samsung, Samba and Alphonso. “It’s really changing the game in terms of measurement.”

He cautions that despite the plethora of data available, “It’s muddy. Not all the data’s perfect. You have to really go through the methodology of how they’re collecting everything. But I’m actually bullish on the data marketplace.”

This video is part of a series The New Marketplace for Television Advertising, presented by dataxu. Please find more videos from the series here.