Bullseye: NCC Media Helps Advertisers Score a Direct Hit with Their Audiences

Can you recall the last commercial you watched? If you’re having a hard time remembering, don’t beat yourself up. Nowadays, it’s all too easy for us to fast forward, block or avoid ads entirely. In order to watch content on one of our many devices, advertising is no longer a necessary precursor to enjoying our favorite shows. While people may be consuming more media in more places than we’ve ever seen, it’s more challenging than ever for advertisers to reach their target audiences. The rise of media fragmentation and ad-blocking technology has exponentially increased the cost of reaching the same number of people it did years ago.

As a result, advertisers are under pressure to accurately allocate spending across TV and digital media and to ensure those precious ad dollars being spent are reaching the right people. Gone are the days when a media buyer’s gut instinct determined which block of airtime to purchase on what channel, replaced instead with advanced analytics.

By aggregating hundreds of terabytes of data from sources like Nielsen ratings, Scarborough local market data and even voting and census data, companies such as NCC Media are able to provide targeted strategies for major retailers, nonprofits and political campaigns. In one of the most contentious election years to date, AdAge reported data and analytics are heavily influencing how political advertisers are purchasing cable TV spots. According to Tim Kay, director of political strategy at NCC, “Media buyers…are basing TV decisions on information such as whether a program’s audience is more likely to vote or be registered gun owners.”

In order for NCC to identify its customers targets more quickly (for example, matching data about cable audiences to voter information and zip codes targets more quickly), NCC built an enterprise data lake with EMC Isilon’s scale-out storage with Hortonworks Data Platform, allowing it to streamline data aggregation and analytics.

To learn more about how Isilon has helped NCC eliminate time-consuming overnight data importation processes and tackle growing data aggregation requirements, check out the video below or read the NCC Media Case Study.