Ampersand Offering Digital-Like Audience Building Tools With LiveRamp Partnership

Ampersand, the joint sales hub for Comcast, Cox and Charter, wants to take a page out of the digital advertising playbook in an expanded partnership with LiveRamp. The integration will allow marketers using Ampersand’s self-serve ad platform, called the AND platform, to create their own custom audiences and connect them across traditional linear and streaming environments. This is a departure from the norm as sellers of TV inventory typically keep information like total reach close to the chest. “It's very rare that somebody with sell-side inventory is willing to be that open on what reach looks like because reach and price are your secret sauce. Those are the tools that allow the sell-side to maximize its yield,” Jay Prasad, chief strategy officer of LiveRamp TV, told Adweek. The goal of the integration is to create simplicity around buying, planning and measuring addressable campaigns and move toward creating consistent audience definitions across linear and digital environments. Ampersand’s footprint covers 85 million homes and claims to reach 60% of all addressable households. Marketers are able to use subscriber data from Ampersand’s collective owners, their own first-party data or third-party data from Polk and Experian to create their advanced TV audiences within the AND platform. Andrew Ward, president of Ampersand, said the TV business needs to move to a more modern construct around planning, buying and measurement. “I can't imagine … anyone in the media business that is looking to stay tethered to an age-gender audience definition,” he told Adweek. Traditional TV viewership has been steadily declining as viewers move away from the traditional cable package and toward streaming alternatives. The TV industry has viewed addressable ad offerings as a way to keep pace with their digital rivals, but the glut of consortia, solutions and sellers has created confusion for the buyers who must plan their addressable campaigns in separate, disconnected environments. “The traditional TV ecosystem has to keep growing its capabilities in addressability, because ultimately, if you're going to try to be apples-to-apples between large digital platforms and traditional television, you have to start getting more capabilities on custom audiences,” said Prasad. The two companies have had an existing relationship where LiveRamp powers the planning and execution of cross-platform and national addressable buys through Ampersand’s AND platform. Kalyan Lanka, vp of product at Ampersand, told Adweek that this expanded partnership is “essentially democratizing the process of audience creation” by letting marketers build their own custom audience definitions across screens. Ad Tech’s Targeting Revolution Will Be Televised