Denali TV Targets Shows That Get Results

Everyone in the TV business is talking about using data to plan and execute ad campaigns that produce better results.

The digital approach to doing this has been to try to send the right pitches to the audiences most like the people already buying a product. What the consumer is watching and when has been a secondary consideration.

Millions have been spent trying to correctly identify which viewers to reach and millions more to ensure the right viewers were served ads and measure how they reacted.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be so hard.

Long Ellis, a TV veteran who has worked at companies including Viacom, Google, Canoe Venture and Alphonso, started up Denali TV three years ago. The idea behind Denali is deceptively simple: when you buy a campaign, put your commercials in the shows that get the best response.

Ellis tells The Measure that most buyers and sellers are not set up to do this, and he has a patent-pending system that optimizes for performance on a real-time basis.

There are a lot of things Denali is not, according to Ellis. It is not a data company. It’s not a DSP or an SSP.

“We're right in the middle. We're Switzerland. We just want to make it good for both sides,” he said. “We're just an optimization layer, we don't get involved in selling, buying, trafficking, billing, you know, sending pre logs, post logs. It's just pretty clean, and we don't want to compete with agencies either. We don't do media planning, we don't do any data modeling, any attribution modeling.”

The data it uses to track outcomes is first-party data from the advertiser.

Denali has been testing its system by running 50 campaigns. “If you target on a program-level basis, your performance can increase by 50%, 100%, 200% because some shows perform way better than the average,” Ellis said.

One campaign was designed to show that Denali TV could reduce an advertiser’s cost per order by 20%. The $20,000 campaign ran across two cable networks and Denali TV optimized ad placements using hourly sales lift estimates and shifting spend toward higher-performing programs rather than evenly distributing ads in broad daypart rotations.

In addition to resulting in a lower cost per order, the campaign produced a 65.9% increase in incremental sales. Unit rates increased by 35.6% on one network and 28.6% on the other.

The bottom line was the advertiser got better outcomes at a lower cost per acquisition while the network got higher unit rates by monetizing higher-performing inventory.

Once the upfronts are over, Ellis says two big TV companies want to put Denali to the test. There are two more in line after that.

Ellis’s business plan is to have the networks pay for Denali’s service.

Because advertisers will get better results, the networks will be able to charge higher rates for it, increasing their yields and revenue.

At the same time, the advertisers will be getting a lower price on a per outcome basis, so it’s also good for them.

It’s easy on the agency as well. “One week is status quo, next week you use Denali. Then they come back with the result,” Ellis says.

Denali will work with both data-driven campaigns on linear and with targeted streaming campaigns on connected TV.

With addressable advertising, a dog food marketer could make sure its commercials were being served only to households with dogs, further boosting efficiency and effectiveness.

Some publishers and platforms have been looking to go beyond the program level to find scenes in shows with contextual relevance. For example, placing commercials for airlines in scenes where the characters were going on a vacation trip.

“We can do this as granular as anyone needs it,” Ellis says. But there are two problems. There’s a limited supply of the appropriate scenes, and the results of that approach hasn’t been established. “You're guessing that it will be better because it's contextually relevant. You're kind of basing it on what you think should happen, not what's happened.”

Ellis’ idea seems so simple that it would be easy for any of the tech giants to replicate. Not so fast, he said.

“There are certain elements that are patent-pending and unique that make the whole thing work. That’s proprietary, he says. “I think there are companies that are probably going try a work around. I think the work around is not very effective.”

Nielsen, Mediaocean, MRI Simmons and S&P Global Mobility Collaborate

Another industry buzzword is interoperability. And a bunch of companies are announcing how they’re collaborating to make data-drive linear ad campaigns and advanced audience measurement more consistent.

Nielsen’s reporting on advanced audience segments for national campaigns will be available within Mediaocean’s Prisma platform. This allows clients to define advanced audience segments in Nielsen’s tools and see them measured in Prisma.

“As the advertising ecosystem becomes increasingly fragmented, maintaining a consistent audience definition across planning, activation, and measurement has become a challenge,” said Prisma chief product officer Drew Kane. “By teaming up with Nielsen, we are helping to create a more connected workflow that brings greater visibility and alignment across the marketing journey.”

At the same time, S&P Global Mobility is integrating data from its Polk Automotive Solutions Portfolio into Nielsen tools including its Audience Builder, Media Impact Nielsen One Planning and Nielsen One Ads.

MRI Simmons’ audience insights will be available in the Nielsen One planning and measurement systems.