TEGNA AudienceOne: The ‘Why’ Behind Our New Customer Data Platform
What is TEGNA AudienceOne and why should your brand take advantage of it? TEGNA’s Dave Neway is here to explain the pain points our new first-party audience data platform alleviates and how it will help your brand make meaningful connections with high-value customers.
By Dave Neway, VP of Ad Sales Marketing at TEGNA
TEGNA AudienceOne is a new digital marketing solution for the third-party-cookie-less era that leverages first-party audience data from TEGNA station websites and apps to help advertisers make meaningful connections with high-value customers.
We developed TEGNA AudienceOne with four key customer headwinds in mind:
- The Crumbling Cookie. Regardless of exactly when Google bids farewell to the cookie, our industry is keenly aware that the days of relying on third-party data signals to inform targeting are numbered. In contrast, first-party data is truly the currency of the new digital economy and is, therefore, a bedrock of this new solution.
- Brand Safety. Advertisers can jeopardize their brand’s reputation if they invest with publishers that aren’t laser-focused on brand safety or don’t have the right type of quality control over the presence of mis-and-disinformation.
- Ad Fraud. All too prevalent in this industry, ad fraud is projected to impact nearly 31 billion American advertisers in 2022. That said, agencies and their clients can’t afford to waste valuable dollars on non-human traffic, given the pressure on optimizing ROAS.
- Personalization and Performance. Across the board, marketers and agencies need efficient and accurate ad tech solutions that reach the target audience with the right message at the right time. However, advertisers need to be able to find their audience throughout their consumer journey as they access content with multiple devices.
With these client pain points in mind, we looked inward for a solution. We recognized an opportunity to harness the power of TEGNA’s own high-quality, multi-platform audience to fuel an audience-targeting solution for today’s advertising environment.
The TEGNA Audience
What’s so great about the TEGNA Audience, you ask? Let me count the ways.
- Most of TEGNA’s digital audience falls within the powerful 25 to 54 age bracket.
- 94% of our viewers are over the age of 24. Our audience over-indexes on affluence – about 47% of our audience earns over $100,000 yearly. Talk about purchasing power!
- TEGNA’s audience also skews females, which bodes well for those looking to reach household decision-makers; women are responsible for 70-80% of all consumer purchasing.
- With over 50 million active audience members per month across 51 markets, TEGNA’s audience also offers the benefit of scale.
How TEGNA AudienceOne Works
TEGNA AudienceOne profiles are formed in four simple steps:
- Collection. As a viewer is digesting content on a TEGNA station website or mobile app, TEGNA AudienceOne synthesizes this activity and behavior, noting what types of articles they’re reading and what types of online behavior they’ve demonstrated.
- Audience Enhancement. We take an audience profile and enhance it with industry-standard audience and database information, such as the US Census data, to further append viewer attributes.
- Categorization and Clustering. Finally, TEGNA AudienceOne categorizes new profiles into organized groups, making it easy for advertisers to target a specific audience, be it pet enthusiasts, job-seekers, politicos, or travel enthusiasts.
Pilot Results
Before releasing TEGNA AudienceOne to the masses, we tested the solution on ourselves and ran a series of pilots across the country. Overall, we saw two things that excited us very excited for our partners: click-throughs exceeded the standard rates of 26%, and video completion rates increased by 7%.
Additionally, we worked with a museum as one of the pilot customers. When running advertising for free admission for children, the museum saw an 8% increase in VCR compared to the ads running without TEGNA AudienceOne. Granted, results will vary, but these initial results are nothing less than encouraging.
Benefits of AudienceOne – Final Thoughts
As we prepare for a cookie-less advertising ecosystem, brands and agencies urgently need privacy-compliant, brand-safe audience-targeting solutions that use first-party data. TEGNA AudienceOne is among the only first-party audience targeting tools in the local media industry that combine demographic and contextual data to enable our partners to reach target audiences with confidence and scale.
Sound Good?
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