Turner Blazes a Trail for Audience Targeting on Television with Operations Research and Advanced Analytics

The novel concept of audience targeting on television poses business and technical challenges that involve disrupting decades-old paradigms about transacting and executing television advertisement deals. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., has leveraged operations research and advanced analytics to take the lead in designing and implementing innovative and integrated forecasting and optimization models that forecast (granular) targeted and (traditional) demographic audiences in the 24/7 programming schedule, generate media deals across all of Turner’s networks, and holistically schedule commercials, balancing the objectives of all of the different types of advertising spots. These scalable and data-source-agnostic methods power Turner’s audience-targeting solutions: TargetingNOW and AudienceNOW. To date, Turner has completed more than 175 targeted media deals and is on track to sell 50% of its inventory through audience targeting by 2020, representing billions in ad revenue for the company. Every TargetingNOW deal has delivered a lift in target audience for advertisers, with a 27% average lift. AudienceNOW has delivered a decrease of at least 20% in target cost per impression for advertisers.