Marketers that seek to reach target audiences and gauge the performance of their advertising have a variety of data tools to gain a better understanding of consumers. Audience engagement is a key indicator of their actual behaviors, though marketers also can glean insights from multiple sources of data.

As part of Samba TV's Leadership Series with Beet TV, we asked Dave Kersey, SVP, Executive Media Director at GSD&M, to share how he leverages multiple data sources to glean audience insights and drive focused scale in the streaming/connected TV landscape.

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“It’s not one dataset across the entire ecosystem. It’s really a series of data points,” Dave Kersey, senior vice president and executive media director at advertising agency GSD&M, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Just because you can view, leverage and access hundreds of thousands of data points doesn’t mean you should use them all.”

As consumers shift their viewing behaviors to over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV) platforms, marketers have more opportunities to get the most out of their first-party data about customers. Combining that information with automated content recognition (ACR) data that indicate what appears on television screens is especially useful for tracking reach and frequency.

“When we look at video specifically, we’re able to understand how to drive focused scale in the streaming/connected TV landscape,” Kersey said. “A partner like Samba is really great at allowing us to have a core opportunity to accomplish this.”

Audience insights provide the basis for developing a strategy to reach consumers through linear television and the newer streaming platforms that sell advertising.

“Things that are critical to understanding this would be the ability to drive messaging and frequency of messaging,” Kersey said. “The opportunity with CTV is to get as precise as possible while building incremental scale, but doing it in a way that’s driving value for the end user.”

Originally published on Beet TV