Audience planning historically relies on segmentation to make brand personas targetable and measurable, but audience definitions often lag behind actual behaviour. Media consumption is fragmented, fast-moving, and deeply personal; people scroll, stream, skip, and switch rather than follow neat, linear patterns. Static, retrospective datasets and pre-built segments miss nuanced behaviours that drive outcomes. Smarter audiences augment traditional targeting with behavioural and attention signals, such as ACR viewership data, enabling real-time engagement-based planning. Marketers can act on recent viewing or ad exposure to meet, exclude, or redirect audiences for better adaptability and performance.
Audience planning has long relied on segmentation. It's how we bring structure to the chaos - turning abstract brand personas into something targetable and measurable. But the way we define audiences hasn't kept pace with the way people actually behave. Today's media environment is fragmented, fast-moving, and deeply personal. People don't consume content in neat, linear ways. They're scrolling, streaming, skipping, switching. And yet, much of our audience strategy is still based on static, retrospective data: a collection of pre-built segments, often designed for another time, place, or platform.
Smarter audiences don't abandon traditional targeting models; they enhance them. They layer in behavioural signals that reflect how people are actually moving through media: what they're watching, where they're watching it, how they engage, and how they respond. Automatic content recognition (ACR) data is one example. By capturing viewership trends across linear and streaming environments, ACR data provides a live signal into what people are watching - not just what we assume they're interested in. That means advertisers can go beyond assumed affinities andinstead build plans rooted in real-time engagement. For instance, if someone just watched the Six Nations on a smart TV, or has been repeatedly exposed to a competitor's linear ad, that's a powerful moment to meet them with the right message (or to actively exclude them and redirect spend elsewhere).
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