Since launching in March of 2007, SeeSaw Networks has become the most extensive network of digital-out-of-home media in the United States. We lead in number of venues, breadth of categories, and depth of geographic reach. Our leadership is also measured in terms of operational excellence, based on a solid methodology that ensures that our advertisers maximize their media investments.
Early on, it was clear that offering advertisers and media agencies the ability to place highly targeted advertising across the country would only be valuable if campaigns would be delivered on time, in each designated venue, and to the correctly identified target audience. Advertising campaigns on SeeSawAds.com must be transparent to media planners and buyers, and this requires that both SeeSaw and our network affiliates pay close attention to detail, and commit to accuracy. SeeSaw uniformly applies standards of quality to each network affiliate; this in turn allows us to provide media agencies with what they need to deliver the highest standard of quality to their clients.
Ensuring Quality – One Affiliate at a Time
SeeSaw executes a rigorous data profiling and qualification process with each prospective affiliate to validate its operational excellence. With hundreds of networks in the marketplace, SeeSaw today has 23 affiliate networks and we expect to double the size of our network by the end of this year. 2009 will see exponential growth. To support that growth, SeeSaw commits time and money to gathering and validating the data that agencies need in order to take advantage of digital out-of-home media. We measure our network affiliates on four key questions to benchmark their value:
- What is the 3rd party validated traffic within the venue?
- What is the awareness of advertising on the digital signage in the venue?
- What are the demographics of the people who frequent the venue?
- Do the venues deliver people within a life pattern that agencies are trying to reach?
Traffic and awareness are critical. In order to measure validated impressions delivered in a campaign, SeeSaw quantifies what percent of a venue’s traffic is aware of the advertising on a network; more on this later.
Demographics are essential. Demographics defining the gender, age, household income, and ethnicity of the impressions within the venue allow a campaign to be targeted and measured against its delivery of an advertiser’s desired viewers.
Life patterns are key. By valuing the networks based upon their contribution to our reach into a specific life pattern, SeeSaw ensures it provides the inventory demanded by our agency partners.
Providing the Richest Set of Network Data in the Industry
Media planners and buyers pride themselves on knowing the ins and outs of the networks they consider. However, when evaluating hundreds of networks across the industry, media planners need simple and comprehensive ways to compare one network versus another. To give media planners a way to compare ’apples to apples’, SeeSaw applies a stringent network qualification and profiling process that creates a uniform set of metrics across our network affiliates.
Each affiliate is defined using five categories of information:
- Venues and Locations
- Content and Programming
- Audience and Life Patterns
- Measurement and Compliance
- Technology and Operations
Given the importance of these categories to the media planning and buying process, it is worth taking a closer look at each of these categories.
Venues and Locations
For each of the individual venues in our network, SeeSaw gathers extensive data that includes a description of the placement of the screens within a location (called a venue), overview of the category to which the venue belongs, pictures of venues, street addresses and traffic by venue, and the total number of venues within the network. This data allows a media buyer to quickly assess the quantity and quality of venues across our network of affiliates, and importantly, how various categories and venues fit with their client’s life pattern.
Content and Programming
As the old adage goes, ‘content is king’. It must engage the people who are watching the screen. Each network affiliate provides specific details about the loop that is running in its venues, including loop length, percent of time allocated to advertising, creative specifications, available spot lengths for ads, and the frequency in which content is updated. SeeSaw also collects and reviews a sample loop of what is running on the network.
Measurement and Compliance
Validating a network’s ability to measure the delivery of media and comply to SeeSaw’s proof of play policies are central to the network profiling process. Each affiliate partner is required to deliver proof of play reports on a monthly basis per campaign. SeeSaw tests this capability with its affiliates prior to executing paid campaigns. SeeSaw also collects data on each network’s screen failure rate and log failure rate to make sure that impressions will be accurately measured by each affiliate network. At the end of the day, media planners and buyers who use these networks must provide their clients with the peace of mind that their media ran successfully. At SeeSaw, we take this responsibility very seriously.
Audience and Life Patterns
At the core of the evaluation of affiliate networks is the process by which we collect third-party data and analyze the audience who will see an ad in any of the venues on the SeeSaw network. This is a critical stage in the data gathering process and is the basis of the ‘rocket science’ behind how the SeeSaw Optimizer creates individually optimized media plans at SeeSawAds.com. We gather sources and audit methods for this data to ensure full transparency to our media planners and buyers.
SeeSaw sells its media based on a very simple formula:
Weekly Traffic * Awareness = Weekly Impressions
For each venue on our network, we calculate the impression that should be delivered during a typical week.
Traffic data identifies the universe of people who could see an ad on the digital screen. Network affiliates provide us validated traffic data for each venue within their network, using either transaction reports from a point-of-sale system or the results of third-party studies.
We then apply an awareness factor to reduce gross traffic to what advertisers care most about – how may people saw advertising on the digital sign. SeeSaw sources the awareness factor either from OTX’s Digital Signage Awareness Studies, which we commission on an annual basis, or from a third-party validated awareness study conducted for a specific affiliate network. We use the OTX study to collect an awareness factor, by vertical category, for the general population.
Factoring awareness estimates the percentage of people who actually saw an ad on the digital screen and is the basis of our measurement of impressions. This provides a uniform metric across a diverse set of venues for agencies and advertisers to consider when they evaluate where to place their ad dollars.
Demographics
SeeSaw gathers demographics on a per-location basis using third-party validated venue demographics, weighted with zip code-specific census data. This allows us to create unique demographics for each location: a convenience store in New York City will not have the same demographics as a similar store in Topeka.
Life Patterns
The demographic data SeeSaw collects across each network provides a starting point for the definition of life patterns, such as College Students, Alpha Moms, Business Professionals, and others. Combing this demographic data with the behavioral characteristics of a target audience across SeeSaw’s extensive network of affiliates uniquely enables Life Pattern Marketing.
Technology and Operations
SeeSaw studies the technology and operational model of each affiliate in detail. Digital sign networks can employ a mixture of different screens, media players, and network connectivity, all factors that contribute to their ad-serving capabilities. Technology impacts the features that a network can support, such as the ability to monitor each location and to quickly and efficiently diagnose and correct problems. This technical capability, combined with the day-to-day operating model, is critical to accurately delivering the impressions for each digital out-of-home media campaign.
To provide media planners with the ability to effectively plan highly targeted national campaigns, SeeSaw continues to add new, top-tier networks to our affiliate program. With several new networks establishing themselves every month, SeeSaw’s selection process ensures that new affiliates in our extensive network maintain the highest levels of quality. Our community of media planners and buyers can rest assured that SeeSaw will continue to raise the bar in the industry by executing a network qualification process that ensures industry-leading quality in the data we collect, the execution of campaigns using our networks, and the timely and accurate delivery of proof of play reports. The sum of these parts means that SeeSaw has created a culture of operational excellence that scales with each new affiliate that we add to our network.
