iHeartMedia and FOX Create ''Smart A/V Audiences''

RADIO ONLINE | Monday, June 19, 2017

iHeartMedia and FOX Networks Group (FNG) announces the launch of Smart A/V Audiences, the first suite of data-driven advertising products available to the marketplace offering campaigns including both Audio and Video creative units integrated onto one platform. Smart A/V Audiences will bring the precision and immediacy of digital advertising to the scale of broadcast radio and television for the first time by creating custom audiences based on the combined power of FNG and iHeartMedia data sets.

Smart A/V Audiences will enable brands to deliver more relevant messages by leveraging Smart A/V data to target consumers based on specific interests and passions like music, sports, specific shows, teams and personalities and then serve to those audiences across a combined audio and video platform. Brands will be able to deliver more compelling creative across platforms by tapping into local data and dynamic creative capabilities based on triggers like weather, sports scores, stock market performance and more. Smart A/V Audiences will launch in beta this fall.

Smart A/V Audiences builds on iHeartMedia's recently launched SmartAudio, which leverages the power of its programmatic solution to help advertisers evaluate, plan and buy broadcast radio, enabling them to build innovative campaigns that target key audience cohorts. It also complements FNG's latest initiatives, including OpenAP and UP//LIFT, which leverage new ad formats and data to deliver higher impact ad units.

"We launched SmartAudio with the goal of continually expanding it with innovative and impactful ways to help our advertising partners revolutionize the way they buy ads," said Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. "Now by combining our assets with the unparalleled data and video assets of Fox, advertising partners can leverage audio and visual as one integrated platform. This is a major breakthrough for the industry and for marketers, allowing brands to leverage both audio and visual platforms to reach consumers like never before."

"Our collaboration with iHeartMedia exemplifies our commitment to creating cross-platform and cross-company tools that enable us to efficiently and effectively deliver targeted audiences to brands, ensuring that the most impactful and engaging messages are being told," said FNG President of Advertising Revenue Joe Marchese. "Smart A/V unites two companies that are innovators in their fields, and together we are uniting the power of customized targeting with real-time creative optimization across television and radio."

Gayle Troberman, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for iHeartMedia, added: "Marketers have been looking for more integrated data solutions and by joining forces we can deliver very specific targeting seamlessly across radio, TV and digital from cars to couches and everywhere in between. We will now have the ability to precision target at massive scale based on everything from consumer passions for music, sports and programming to sentiments, moments and locations, creating more relevance and better context for results than ever before in broadcast advertising. This is the next greenfield for creatives and data scientists to align."

Ed Davis, Chief Product Officer for FNG Advertising Sales, commented: "Being able to assemble the right audience, at scale, is the first component in generating the best possible returns for advertisers. The second component is the ability to tune live campaign creative and exposure profiles based on our real-time monitoring of brand performance data. Sharing the necessary data between Fox and iHeartMedia unlocks the best mechanics to move consumers."