Contrary to some thinking, local advertisers quite often know who their existing and potential customers are. They just don\u2019t always know how best to reach them, but local audience segments that weren\u2019t available three years ago are helping to solve that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe local marketers are some of the most sophisticated marketers that you\u2019ll find out there,\u201d says Comcast Spotlight Chief Revenue Officer Brendan Condon. \u201cPrimarily because when you think about their investment spend in media, in advertising, it could be a significant portion of their operating expense. So they can\u2019t afford to make mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In this Beet.TV interview at the recent Advanced Advertising Forum<\/a> in Manhattan, Condon offers up the example of a local pizza client.<\/p>\n \u201cI know exactly who my audiences are,\u201d he quotes the client as saying. There\u2019s the CEO of food (\u201cthe mom feeding her children\u201d) followed by sports fanatics \u201cwho are only ordering pizza when they\u2019re watching sports.\u201d Then there is \u201cthis other segment of people who are buying pizza because it\u2019s more cost effective or an efficient way to save money and yet have a sustainable meal while watching television or doing anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n Armed with those insights, Comcast Spotlight produced three different audiences by types of viewers, the content they watch on TV and the corresponding geographic trading areas. Then it created \u201cdifferent proposals and plans so that they could have different creative or different messaging with the same creative to three different audiences, again within the same geography,\u201d Condon says. \u201cThree years ago we could not do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Condon arrived<\/a> at Comcast Spotlight in the fall of 2018 from AdMore, an audience-based programmatic television advertising platform, and REVShare, one of the nation\u2019s largest short-form direct-response providers, at Cannella Media. He explains how Comcast Spotlight has reorganized to get even closer to local advertisers.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve de-layered the management team so that not only the senior leadership but all the way down to the sellers they\u2019re freed up to spend more time with their clients. Being consultants and understanding what\u2019s their business, what are the nuances and the challenges that they have and how can we provide a scalable viable solution for them.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the process is re-educating local businesses to the reality of modern-day TV consumption, given that the average household watches 17-plus networks on any given day.<\/p>\n \u201cFor us as an MVPD or anyone within the industry, you have to be able to go broader to get across those networks and go deep with the same level of out-of-pocket costs so that you\u2019re therefore becoming much more efficient,\u201d says Condon.<\/p>\n For marketers that have always wanted just to advertise in primetime programming, he cites The New TV<\/a>-a recent white paper showing how just over two-thirds of all viewing occurs outside of primetime. Others have just wanted to be in live programming consisting of news and sports.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s other things that happen episodically live that we can target on the localized basis on your behalf that will be just as effective if not even maybe more efficient than what you\u2019ve been traditionally doing,\u201d Condon says.<\/p>\n