Multi Channel Network (MCN) is partnering analytics software company SAS to deliver a new data management solution that integrates all of MCN’s different data sources to provide advertisers with a single consumer view across linear TV and all digital platforms.
Known as SIA, the data tool combines MCN's data sources from TV, online, mobile, location and OOH, as well as data from agencies and advertisers. This includes adding data assets from Telstra, Near (MCN's location data).
It will act as a central nervous system for all of MCN's data assets and business initiatives, including programmatic TV and addressable advertising as well as new business models around data.
At MCN, addressability can be targeted in two ways, either by a user at the device level or to a household at the set top box level.
MCN tells AdNews it will begin rolling out IP addressable advertising opportunities in FY18 Q3, which is from the start of next year and it will roll out linear TV addressability in the second half of next year.
“We're a few months away with IP addressability and the reason we are working with this timeline is because we are working on the broadcast linear addressability as well. Come Q1 or Q2 of FY19, you as an ad buyer will be able to buy the full range of addressable advertising services,” MCN chief data officer Mark Brandon says.
SIA was a key part of MCN's partner fronts this year and is planned to launch in 2018 with a phased roll out. MCN has already begun trialling certain parts of the platform since early 2017.
“We're trialling the ability to onboard data in a privacy compliant and commercially appropriate manner. We are trialling the brining together of disparate data sets from TV and digital sources because that's what partners want and most of them are really keen for us to make that jump,” Brandon says.
“We're trialling the ability to create audience of customer segments on the fly and as we go beyond the MVP phase we will effectively industrialised all those processes.”
SIA's development roadmap is being synced with its plans for addressable advertising in both IP and linear delivered television.
A key benefit of SIA is that it provides a single view between multiple media channels, an ambition the market has been craving for some time but nobody has come close to delivering.
“There's a lot of work to bring data above and beyond coookie type data to a data proposition. As we get better at leveraging the partnership we've built with SAS we think we've got a decent shot at creating that single view of a customer, that golden record as some people call it. It's an ambition and it will happen over time.
“The stakeholders of our business (Foxtel) has most of the ingredients necessary to get a decent handle on what the common garderner or average Australian is doing because Foxtel are successful with an open device and premium set top box strategy. We've got quit lot of reads on people.”
Brandon points out that none of this involve targeting individuals with personable identifiable data but it should build a system over time that reaches a much more granular fashion.
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