iSpot's Stu Schwartzapfel Explains Outcome-Based Buys

This Measure Up video is brought to you by iSpot.tv, the complete real-time TV ad measurement and attribution company trusted by America’s leading brands and networks. Learn how iSpot is being used as a currency here.

Television advertising buys don't happen in the dark. And as it becomes increasingly harder to pin down your ideal audience just using traditional metrics, it's essential for ad spend to map directly to business outcomes -- be it on the sell- or demand-side.

iSpot has been bringing outcome-based ad transactions to TV since 2018, and has only built on that idea since. Last year, it introduced business outcome benchmarking, providing predictable norms for performance measures of incremental lift and conversion across 17 different industries.

That sounds sensible, of course. But how do outcome-based ad buys actually work?

As iSpot's SVP of Media Partnerships Stu Schwartzapfel explains, the company looks at outcome-based buying in two ways: proactive and organic.

According to Schwartzapfel, organic outcome-based buying means that existing customers -- on the brand side or the network side -- will say something like: "We're very eager to put outcome-based buys out into the marketplace. We have a time period in mind, we need your help setting some norms in order to establish a campaign start and stop dates." And they'll take iSpot data and use it as a secondary guarantee behind Nielsen GRPs, or something cut from that cloth.

Then there's proactive outcome-based buying, which is when iSpot approaches its roster of 250 brands on the buy- and sell-side and says, "... (we) don't know if you know this, but (you) have a crazy amount of penetration on buy and sell side," and from there, brings opportunities based on what the data's yielded against certain (repeatable) parameters.

iSpot and its clients' continued push into outcome-based buying continues to position the company as the leading secondary TV ad currency behind Nielsen. As outcome-based buying and alternative currencies become a more prevalent aspect of TV decision-making, those transactions will become better informed -- and potentially, money better spent (and ad slots better sold).