From The 'Big 3' To 'Big Data:' TV Audience Targeting Comes Of Age

At a time when Madison Avenue has been consumed by the role Big Data is playing in transforming the rest of its marketing and media mix -- especially online, social and mobile -- parallel developments have been radically altering the infrastructure for planning, buying and evaluating its biggest medium, television.

The shift was highlighted by the announcement that GroupM -- the largest buyer of media, including TV -- has created a new unit to accelerate the shift from old school media-buying to the next generation of data-driven audience-targeting, but GroupM was merely formalizing a fundamental change that has been taking place within it, and most other big agencies.

Much of the focus in the shift from media-buying to audience-buying has centered on the role of automation, especially programmatic platforms, exchanges, etc., because that has been the most visible part of the shift transforming the online display, social and mobile marketplaces, but the other part -- the shift taking place in the way TV audience targeting is changing due to the availability of an unprecedented amount of data -- is, in many ways, a much bigger and more fundamental shift in the way media is planned, bought and evaluated by advertisers and agencies. The shift toward more sophisticated audience targeting will be far more transformative to the TV advertising marketplace, because it will fundamentally change the basis of evaluating the medium and will shift massive amounts of advertising budgets within TV as well as across other media.