Why Data-Driven Linear Is the Last Piece of the Marketing Puzzle

By: Kurt Robinson, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Swoop

Reduce waste, optimize media and achieve cross-channel attribution by unifying television.

Pharma spends almost its entire advertising budget — a startling 75% — on live broadcast (or, linear) TV commercials, attempting to convert patients that may not even be watching. Instead of relying on demographics and other failed metrics for planning, marketers need to take a data-driven approach to linear investment to connect the entire television ecosystem, optimize budgets and leverage cross-channel attribution with a single custom patient audience.  

Advertisers continue to rely on basic demographics and household-level measurement to target linear TV viewers, despite utilizing more sophisticated outreach tactics across all other channels. For example, a company with a drug for HIV may run a commercial during a late-night show popular among those aged 18-49. In this case, the assumption is that HIV patients would statistically be included within the demographic — despite not having any information on the audience’s health status.

However, health marketers can now be more precise in their targeting with audiences generated from real world data (RWD), or a patient’s entire health history — from doctor’s visits to prescriptions filled — based on insurance claims. The same privacy-safe custom patient audiences used in digital marketing can be activated across all TV, including linear.

This is achievable through artificial intelligence (AI), which transform Swoop’s extensive RWD universe of more than 300 million de-identified patient journeys over ten years into actionable segments. All segments are created based on brand-specific criteria, whether that includes patients who were recently diagnosed, those with a history of non-adherence, or patients suffering from a specific comorbidity.

Leveraging a single, targeted audience enables better planning; marketers can optimize the media mix according to consumer behavior and more accurately measure post-campaign results — making cross-channel attribution a reality. Armed with insight into how campaign performance contributes to script lift across all TV mediums, marketers can respond in near real time and shift spend if needed, reducing waste. This “one audience” can be activated and then measured to confirm reach and frequency.

Instead of hoping to engage an impossibly large demographic — as the overwhelming majority will tune out — Swoop gives our partners access to tokenized patients across all TV inventory. In doing so, we’re unifying television, whether linear broadcast, household addressable or CTV/OTT, and targeting outreach. By selecting a partner like Swoop, it’s possible to decrease waste with cross-channel attribution and spend more strategically across all TV mediums.

5 Steps to Take Advantage of Precision Audiences Across TV Inventory

1.    Identify planning and activation partners

2.    Specify activation channels (data-driven linear, addressable, CTV)

3.    Confirm distribution access

4.    Match custom audiences to all applicable universes

5.    Distribute audiences to all TV partners via LiveRamp

About the Author

Kurt Robinson

Senior Vice President of Business Development

Robinson is the EVP, Head of Business for Swoop. He has been with the company for over a decade. Prior to joining Swoop, he was the National Sales Executive for Viewpoints in Digital Media Sales and as a Senior Online Media Buyer for Q Interactive. He has a BA from Ohio University and is based in Chicago, Illinois.