Ahead of the Trinity Lunch Winter 2023, we caught up with Andy Beames, Director of Client Partnerships, Data at Samba TV
Is this your first Trinity Lunch event and what do you expect from the day?
This will be my third Trinity lunch – what continues to draw me back is the forum it provides for connection, conversation and collaboration. There are no pitches or presentations, but there’s candid and meaningful dialogue that encourages people to think differently. I expect this end of year event to serve as a great platform for us to connect and go into 2024 with a fresh perspective.
From conversations and presentations you’ve seen and been part of, what is the industry talking about right now?
We’re in an era of ‘solving for TV measurement’, and I see urgency behind conversations with clients and thought leadership at industry events. The focus underscores a collective desire to address fragmentation, complexity and wastage in a cookieless environment.
I think we need to ask the question: what objective and outcomes are we measuring and why, in order to look at how to best measure this. Are we measuring for brand uplift, attention or incrementality? Which reliable data sources should we look at to break down those silos and provide actionable insights that inform accurate and reliable decision-making?
It may seem like the industry is having a never-ending discussion on TV measurement, but as long as the North Star is clear to everyone (which I think it is), we will make progress and achieve a better way to measure.
If you were to highlight 3 topics as being most important to your partners and clients, what would they be?
- Measurement that is simple, consistent and future-proofed. Everyone is seeking a unified approach to navigating the fragmented TV landscape. It’s positive that the industry is taking a testing approach to explore different data sources. In addition to collaborating with our clients and partners, we’re also working with ISBA on Project Origin to explore how our first-party viewership data can provide a more accurate and representative way to measure TV viewership behaviour.
- Incremental reach to identify and engage with elusive audiences no matter where the eyeballs are. Being able to truly understand the ever-changing TV viewership behaviour is table stakes. A key limitation here is not having enough of the right data to connect the dots of this shifting behaviour in time to reach under-exposed audiences at the right place, or to manage overexposure to reduce wastage. Helping our clients secure a unified and deduplicated view of audience behaviour is a big focus of ours.
- More cohesive brand experiences for consumer.TV is such an impactful medium for brands to connect with consumers. At this time of year all eyes are on the unique Christmas ads intended to reach customers through humour, moving tales and creative storylines. Looking beyond linear, which still absorbs most of media spend, brands have greater appetite to extend those brand experiences across screens and platforms, not just in the household but also on DOOH, audio, CTV, social etc. There’s a heightened focus on consumer-centric planning and cross-media effectiveness.
Is the digital marketing industry ready for the ‘cookieless’ era?
Whilst much of the industry has been focused on next-generation universal IDs as a cookie replacement, at Samba TV we have been championing the use of our first-party viewership data, analysed at a geographic level to activate in cookieless environments such as DOOH and CTV. The data is 100% opt-in, built with compliance and consumer choice at the core to give advertisers a privacy-safe and unbiased way to plan and activate across screens, platforms and media channels.
