CIMM's Jane Clarke On The Dream of 1:1 Targeting

Visions of 1:1 advertising have been dancing in marketers’ heads ever since the digital cookie was created. If you could marry the power of TV—premium content, brand-safe, 100 percent viewability—with the targeting and attribution of digital, well, that would be something indeed.

As the years have stretched on, the promise of hyper-targeted TV advertising is inching closer to reality. (Thanks, connected TV!) But, cautions Jane Clarke, CEO and Managing Director of the Coalition for Innovative Measurement, TV may never be able to reach 1:1 targeting and attribution.

“To be able to do this, you need to do whatever matching you're doing in some privacy-compliant clean room someplace,” Clarke told TV[R]EV at CES. “But when you bring it out to actually have applications of reporting and targeting of advertising, it has to be at a segment level rather than at an individual one to one level.”

And that’s okay. The 1:1 targeting and attribution of digital advertising has a host of issues—think of the annoyance of being followed around the internet by an ad for shoes you’ve already decided you don’t want, but increase that by a factor of 10 because that ad is now interrupting your stories.

Here’s the full transcript from our conversation with Clarke:  

"What I'm hearing as ideas from the TV ecosystem, the TV industry, is what the MVPDs have always done with their set top box data, is to aggregate it up to a certain level of households and to treat this as segmentation, not sort of one-to-one targeting.

So what you're doing is, you're creating segments and you're having your advertising, your marketing, go to a segment, rather than in digital where it's been very much one-to-one. There's a whole bunch of marketers now that are getting more involved in measurement issues and cross platform measurement. Out of the World Federation of advertisers, they're starting to come together and put out like guidelines for what they want.

The big digital players, Google and Facebook, are also involved in those discussions. They're even coming to the same conclusion that to be able to do this, you need to do whatever matching you're doing in some privacy-compliant clean room someplace. But when you bring it out, to actually have applications of reporting and targeting of advertising, it has to be at a segment level rather than at an individual one to one level."