Sky Media Elevates Search Behaviour Targeting Through Captify Partnership

Last year, Sky Media launched Search Behaviour Targeting, allowing brands, for the first time, to target TV audiences based on online search behaviours. Following strong advertiser uptake, Sky Media has enhanced its partnership with Captify, the leader in real time audiences and insights fuelled by search intelligence, offering even more granular and bespoke targeting for brands.

With 1.5 billion UK searches tracked each month, the number of categories available for advertisers has more than doubled to eighteen off-the-shelf audiences, meaning greater targeting options and granularity. Alongside this, sectors such as ‘Holidays’ and ‘Home Improvement,’ have been introduced. Sky Media has also enabled bespoke audiences through a custom request process. This allows advertisers to tap into Captify’s extensive list of custom categories, including everything from ‘Pet and Animal’ Interests to ‘Real Estate’ and ‘Fantasy Sport;’ combining Captify’s custom categories to create a bespoke target audience for their campaign.

British Airways Holidays and The Ministry of Justice, in partnership with MG OMD and OmniGOV, were first to bring this new product to market as pilot partners.

Brands such as British Airways Holidays have utilised the ‘Travel’ search behaviours to expand their campaigns to reach active holiday seekers, as well as kitchen retailers who have targeted those looking to improve their homes.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) were one of the first advertisers to embrace Sky Media’s Search Behaviour Targeting to great success for their Prison Officer recruitment campaign*. AdSmart enabled the MoJ to reach households that had been searching online for ‘Jobs’ and ‘Education’ in the last month, combined with regional targeting around key prison recruitment areas. As a result, the MoJ saw a 170% uplift in prompted ad recall from those exposed to the ads versus the unexposed audience, which was a 24.3%pt uplift.

*All Sky Media targeted advertising is compliant with the GDPR regulations and audience targeting data is Sky Media owned, licensed, or processed on clients’ behalf.

Ben Stack, Ministry of Justice’s Deputy Director of Recruitment & Retention Communications, said: “Targeting our advertising in this innovative and effective way delivers better value for the taxpayer and allows our campaign investment to go further – having a real-world impact on our work to protect the public.”

The partnership will allow for targeting across both linear and on demand content across hundreds of Sky Media channels.

Rishi Chande, SVP of Global Strategy & Business Development at Captify said: “We are delighted by the growing demand from Sky Media’s clients to use Captify search data to reach desired target audiences. We are working closely with the Sky Media team to improve the targeting and attend to the demands of their different clients. This partnership means a step forward of bringing the digital world to the TV and helping clients such as the Ministry of Justice to reach TV audiences as never before.”

Dan Cohen, Director of Product & Advertising Innovation at Sky Media said: “Our effort to bring the best capabilities of digital to the brand-safe, big screen world of TV has been recognised by our clients, through their adoption of Search Behaviour Targeting. The Ministry of Justice is an excellent example of this. We listen to our client’s needs and have worked hard to improve our offering to cater to more clients and our partnership with Captify is a great example of this.”

Sky brings TV and digital closer together with new Search Behaviour Targeting

Sky Media, has announced new Search Behaviour targeting capability for the AdSmart addressable platform. Driven by wider industry demand to bring digital and TV campaigns closer together, Search Behaviour attributes allows brands for the first time to target audiences based on specific online search behaviours including frequency and intent.

Using search data categorised by frequency and intent, which is then matched to Sky’s first party data – advertisers can engage audiences who are in market and actively searching for products and services. Leveraged through market leading AdSmart, targeted ads are delivered into relevant households in both live and on demand content across millions of Sky, Virgin and Now homes.

Seven search behaviour categories are available at launch: Home & Garden, Travel, News, Job & Education, Arts and Entertainment, Games, Pets and Animals. Search Behaviour Targeting identifies people at every stage of their purchase journey, from initial research, through to adding items to their online basket. Search behaviour habits can be combined with any of the other existing 1000+ AdSmart attributes to refine campaigns. This could include postcodes, lifestage, mosaic groups or an advertiser’s own first party data. As an example, a custom campaign could see a holiday or insurance company target those who are actively searching for holidays or flights. This could be further refined or creative adapted to those looking at beach, sightseeing or ski holidays in a specific area of the country. The Search Behaviour targeting capability has been developed in conjunction with Captify, who are the largest independent holder of search data.

Ruth Cartwright, Investment Director at Sky Media – “TV remains the most effective and engaging platform for brands. Being able to embrace the best capabilities of digital but in the brand safe, big screen, world of TV, makes campaigns more relevant and impactful. That’s what we’re hearing from brands and agencies, so that’s where we’re focusing our innovations.”

Helping advertisers connect with audiences wherever they watch is part of an ongoing roadmap of innovation from Sky Media, bringing TV and digital closer together. AdSmart launched nearly ten years ago and was the world’s first TV addressable advertising platform. Launched a few years later Sky AdVance opened-up digital targeting based on TV viewing and upcoming Creative Optimisation will help performance brands programmatically adapt their TV creatives to optimise response.