Published on Variety
Interpublic Group, the ad-holding company that has made a concerted bid to enlist new kinds of audience data into planning how and where commercials run, hopes to turbocharge its efforts in a new partnership with OpenAP, a consortium of the big U.S media companies that helps identify similar consumer audiences across different companies’ platforms.
Under terms of the new pact, Interpublic Group’s MAGNA media-investment arm will be able to identify discrete group of consumer audiences and distribute commercials to reach them via OpenAP. Magna will tap data from Axciom, a unit that specializes in housing and managing scads of customer data that Interpublic purchased for $2.3 billion in 2018.
“We have a lot of audiences we have built within Axicom that we want to be able to distribute via all our video endpoints — across linear, CTV, OTT,’” says Larene Mantel, vice president of strategic investment for Magna Global, during an interview. She says using OpenAP will enable Magna not only to plan better ways to reach specific audiences, but to analyze performance of ads in spurring recall, action and other outcomes.
The deal is unveiled as more advertisers and media companies are preparing for the industry’s next “upfront” market, when TV networks try to sell the bulk of their ad inventory ahead of the next cycle of programming. Marketers are increasingly interested in new ways of tabulating audiences and U.S. media companies, which still rely on Nielsen to do so, are also cobbling new deals with start-ups and rivals that count audiences in new ways.
“This partnership with OpenAP simplifies a complex process and gives the actionable data our team’s need in the planning stage to maximize our clients’ investments,” said Dani Benowitz, Global President, at MAGNA, in a prepared statement.
OpenAP is backed by NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox Corp. and Paramount Global, among others. The company aims to help advertisers reach certain consumer categories that remain the same no matter which company’s inventory is being purchased, and the chance to create benchmarks that can be more easily compared.
