LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO: This is a "golden era" for traditional media, according to an industry figure who argues that data and technology are enabling marketers to add value to their television buying.

In Get TV reach for strategic audience targets, which appears in the current issue of Admap, Matthew Bayer, SVP of TV at Cadreon, says that programmatic allows planning and buying of TV and video in a cohesive manner, ensuring more return for clients, and optimised advertising based on consumption habits.

He pinpoints two data trends that are driving this. Firstly, there is simply more audience data available from various sources; secondly, there is currently a shift from survey-based data to observed data.

"Automation enables this more granular data to scale and be applied to a scalable amount of inventory sources," Bayer says.

Applying programmatic principles to television buying means moving towards strategic audience targets rather than using the broad demographics that have hitherto been proxies for clients' customers.

TV can still be used to deliver brand awareness, reach, and mass impression and to ensure product launches are known to mass audiences.

But, Bayer adds, "adopting programmatic principles in TV will have complementary value to traditional TV, delivering reach against strategic audience targets, our clients' best customers, more efficiently and effectively than ever before".

Reaching a beer drinker, for example, now involves more than buying late-night television, sports content, Comedy Central, FX, USA and Turner, he suggested.

By using set-top box data and predictive algorithms, marketers can understand where they are not reaching the beer drinker with a traditional base TV plan, and so leverage audience buying to maximise reach against a beer drinker.

Similarly, household-addressable TV can be leveraged to ensure frequency against, for example, millennial Hispanic male beer drinkers.

And zone-addressable TV can match cable zones to the target audience to ensure marketers reach those areas that have a higher propensity to reach their key customers.

Bayer expects that the evolution of this approach will move buying out of existing silos and towards buying across all video platforms inclusive of TV and digital.

"Programmatic and automation can help us manage reach/frequency across screens, identify the impact of digital and TV ad exposure to driving media outputs or business outcomes, and leverage insights to apply to buys to make them more impactful," he states.

Data sourced from Admap