Visible World, Polk Partner on Addressable TV Ad Solutions for Automotive Advertisers

Targeted TV advertising specialist, Visible World, said last week that it has formed a partnership with RL Polk & Co., a provider of automotive information and marketing solutions, to enable automated data-driven TV ad targeting for automotive advertisers. Advertisers can now use Visible World's addressable advertising technology, in conjunction with Polk's automotive data, to target their ads, the companies say: as a result of the partnership, Polk's industry-specific data will be available via Visible World's Conductor, a Web-based campaign management system that the company bills as enabling sophisticated, data-driven segmentation for TV ads.

Polk is the latest in a series of major data providers to partner with Visible World and make its data available via the company's Conductor campaign management system: last year, the company announced similar partnerships with Acxiom, Experian and Nielsen. "By teaming up with Polk, we're now able to offer our clients access to important data points for the automotive industry, helping them to target and optimize messages for their target audience segments," Visible World CEO, Seth Haberman, said in a prepared statement. Added Polk chairman, president and CEO, Stephen Polk: "Our direct marketing clients have had access to advanced segmentation and targeting capabilities in direct and online marketing. Now with Visible World, we can offer them new data targeting capabilities and accountable solutions for one of the most influential automotive advertising mediums, television."

According to the companies, their partnership means that advertisers can now use for TV ad campaigns some of the same "sophisticated" automotive data that they have been using for direct mail campaigns. For example, they claim, auto marketers could segment their audience by propensity to sell various vehicle segment types in specific sub-DMA geographies, and drill down even further to take into consideration data regarding lease vs. buy, historical average MSRP and other factors. There is also a unique capability to target segments based on Polk's models that identify "households most likely to be in the market for a vehicle" within a certain time period, the companies say.

According to Visible World, Conductor instantly calculates optimal rotations across thousands of targets on the specified media buy, and automates campaign execution. This, the company says, enables advertisers to automatically determine an optimal rotation of their ads, down to a neighborhood.