SeeSaw, DPAA announce tools intended to help DOOH media planning process

March 23, 2011 by Dave Haynes

SeeSaw Networks has announced what it is calling a new reach and frequency model that calculates media plan audience deliveries across multiple digital place-based media networks.

The release is a little heavy on  how swell it is, and light on what’s actually being done, but here’s what is laid out:

Developing place-based buys through the SeeSaw platform, says the release, planners will now be able to analyze various overall media campaign scenarios by plugging reliable, robust audience delivery data into their agency’s media mix modeling software.

“Digital place-based media plan deliveries must consider not only the media consumption of an audience member within a particular venue where a video ad network is present, but also the complex patterns of visiting multiple venues within a given span of time,” said Leslie Wood, President of Leslie Wood Research, Inc, which developed the model in conjunction with SeeSaw.

“SeeSaw has always uniquely enabled advertisers to effectively intercept hard-to-reach audiences in their everyday life patterns,” said Peter Bowen, CEO of SeeSaw Networks. “But until now, it has been virtually impossible for media planners to optimally plan campaigns to maximize reach and frequency objectives that include place-based media. SeeSaw helps planners compare TV plans and digital place-based media plans side-by-side, fostering an integrated plan that improves the performance of a TV-only campaign.”

“I am very encouraged about this development, as getting to trustworthy and comparable audience delivery metrics is important for digital place-based networks. They need to be viewed and compared on a somewhat ‘level playing field’ as other video platforms,” stated Sean Smith, SVP Group Media Director at DraftFCB. “My planning teams look to assemble holistic video offers that deliver the highest engagement levels possible against consumer segments, and we should have in many cases, similar metrics and estimates to get us there.”

Hard to say how much it differs from other tools out there based on the limited information of the release, but certainly there is no end of people on the planning side saying they are eager to see anything that gets them closer to apples to apples comparisons between networks. Right now it is more like apples to pineapples, at times, and there’s not a lot of trust in the numbers (because they are all over the place).

The SeeSaw tool has the support of the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association (they comment in the release). The DPAA has also this week released its InfoCenter search and discovery tool for media planners. The platform was built by Ayuda and is popiulated by network informatgion also intended to help planners sort through the scores of different media opportunities out there.

“The Advertising community has stated a need for a rich, visual tool to help facilitate the use of this nascent industry,” said Sue Danaher, President of DPAA, the driving force behind the launch of this digital place-based media platform, “and now they have it. Throughout our Beta testing, the feedback from the advertising community has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Kris Magel, Executive Vice President, Director National Broadcast at Initiative, added, “This is a great new tool for anyone looking to identify venues that might fit their communication objectives. I’m confident it will aid in the implementation of our place-based media strategies.”

“A key strength of this software platform is the ability of both Arbitron and Nielsen to feed their information directly into InfoCenter. This will greatly aid in heighten credibility of our industry,” Ms. Danaher proudly stated. “InfoCenter, housed on our newly designed website, is free to all of the Advertising community. It is currently a listing of member network operators but we welcome non-member information, for a nominal charge, to also be included on the site. Interested non-member network operators need only contact us.”