CANNES \u2013 IRI has almost 400 million reasons why television should no longer be planned and bought based on traditional age\/gender metrics and related proxies. That\u2019s the number of consumer loyalty cards the company can access to discern what virtually every U.S. household purchases offline.<\/p>\n
But until recently, data from those cards has taken a back seat to the traditional buying and selling of TV ad inventory. According to Nishat Mehta, President of IRI\u2019s<\/a> Media Center of Excellence, the industry had been on a trajectory that simply wasn\u2019t sustainable.<\/p>\n \u201cThe notion of accountability starts with making sure that the consumer was receiving what we thought was best for them, and then second that what we think is best for them is actually based on accurate knowledge of who that consumer is,\u201d Mehta says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes<\/a> Lions International Festival of Creativity. \u201cAnd I think we had been following a path where neither of those was really being met. That ultimately leads to a consumer who is angry at the advertising industry and ultimately will shut us off.\u201d<\/p>\n Mehta considers the new European Union GDPR initiative to be a \u201cmulti-year effort to clean up the industry\u201d and the challenges of Facebook and other digital companies as paving the way for needed changes. Namely, to take lessons from digital targeting and bring them to TV.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe very strongly in the notion of optimizing linear TV,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n And while he\u2019s hardly the first to suggest that age\/gender demos for TV targeting are past their prime, IRI is offering \u201ca set of capabilities focused around data and accurate data to the market that allow television to now be bought on sold on what people actually do rather than what we think they do.\u201d<\/p>\n This is where data from the nearly 400 million loyalty cards come in, representing about 110 million households. \u201cWe have significant penetration across virtually every household in the U.S. about the types of products that they actually purchase in the physical world,\u201d says Mehta<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asked to summarize his Cannes experience, he thinks it\u2019s shifting more toward adtech and \u201ca little bit away from the actual advertisers. I hope that\u2019s not a trend we see going forward. I hope we do see some balance coming back.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we need to continue to remind ourselves who we work for. At the end of the day, it\u2019s the consumer represented by the advertiser and if we don\u2019t watch out we\u2019ll lose track of that.<\/p>\n