Turning Search Activity Into An Actionable Metric: EDO's Scott Grunther
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — EDO (short for Entertainment Data Oracle) is looking to capture from “middle of the funnel” metrics for TV advertising by tracking matching search activity to ad activity.
“Search is an ideal measure of consumer intent,” notes EDO’s Chief Revenue Officer Scott Grunther. “It starts with the premise that people are watching with a device in their hand or on their lap, and if the ad triggers interest or engagement, the first thing they are going to do is pick up their phone and Google the brand or product being advertised.”
EDO does this by maintaining a TV ad database that takes in a 24//7/365 feed from over 127 television networks. They then map spikes in search activity against that database, looking second-by-second to see which ads are responsible for the spikes.
Grunther sees EDO as a complement to attribution, as they are not capturing any sort of individual data but rather looking at search activity in general versus when the ad ran, e.g., they do not look to see if User X searched for “Ford trucks’ after seeing a Ford Truck ad. Rather, they look to see if there was an uptick in search activity for Ford Trucks overall when a Ford Truck ad was running.
“Our goal was to create a currency-grade measure and there are three things that you need to do that: speed, scale and syndication,” Grunther explained. “Since we are basically in the middle of the funnel, we looked at how you capture engagement with those three things and ultimately enable marketers and brands and networks and agencies to optimize on that data, plan on that data, measure performance on that data, and ultimately transact on that data.”
EDO’s initial clients were movie studios looking to see whether their ads had driven any search activity. “Movie studios are the most urgent and accountable marketer,” Grunther notes. “They squeeze thousands of ads into a very short window of time and they can’t wait to see how performance is going to be after the fact. So they take our results and they’re able to say ‘let’s do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.’”
Today, the company has expanded to handle everything from CPG brands to automotive, restaurants and insurance companies, who use EDO's data for everything from creative optimization to media planning to campaign measurement.
Right now EDO is only measuring activity on linear TV but Grunther said that the addition of CTV/OTT measurement is most definitely on EDO's roadmap.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi. For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.
