How to use real-time data to overcome a media lockout

January 26, 2012

Telecasts of big events like the Super Bowl, NFL Playoffs, Academy Awards, Olympic Games, Final Four and Bowl Championship Series deliver premium audiences with maximum reach. But what happens if your competitor has purchased the entire advertising inventory for your category and locked you out?

Media lockouts are common among large scale event based broadcasts because they capture the largest TV audiences. Many brands are effectively locked out from the start because they can’t match the media budgets of larger competitors. For locked-out companies, embracing creative techniques to uncover alternative media options is essential. The good news in today’s fragmented media landscape is that your brand can navigate around a lockout if you tap into the media consumption trends of your target audience. The challenge is to develop a plan to reach this audience that is grounded in consumer behavior rather than gut-based decisions.

Networked Insights analysts helped one of our clients and its media agency develop a plan to end-run a high-profile lockout during a critical product launch. The well-known consumer electronics brand was trying to reach a premium sports audience, but a competing advertiser had locked it out of a major televised sports series. To help our client find another route to reaching the same target audience, we conducted social media analytics across a global audience to determine what shows the target audience watches and engages with during halftime or after the locked-out game. The information we uncovered enabled the client to pay lower rates for shows delivering the same or greater target rating points within its sports audience than the locked-out sports series.

Networked Insights has helped brands facing both event-specific and perpetual lockouts. Our Media Sync taps into social media channels to unearth the real-time media consumption trends of target consumers. As brands embrace more adaptive marketing techniques, consumer data in social media will become a beacon for many marketing decisions. Today only the most creative, resourceful and forward-thinking companies incorporate real-time data into their decision making. As access to real-time consumer data grows, others are bound to join them.

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