Omnicom Gets Real-Time Data with Fox Audience Network

Omnicom Media Group can now analyze impressions in real-time for display ads that run on News Corp.’s Fox Audience Network (FAN) and then adjust bidding or buying strategies accordingly, the two gigantic industry brands said yesterday. It’s the first agreement of its kind that FAN — with its 700 publisher sites — has struck with an ad agency.

Performance data will be available for Omnicom’s buyers and brand clients on a back-end dashboard that’s designed to let them pinpoint what sites are producing impression spikes vs. ones that are not panning out as well. A News Corp. spokesman declined to state whether other metrics like conversion rates and ROI analysis would also be available on the dashboard. Whatever the case, campaign planners will be able to use the impressions data to augment other available statistics while finalizing media buys and creative.

In addition, FAN’s audience segmentation system was designed to allow marketers to group anonymous online consumers who share mutual interests like sports, movies, and music, and then target them. It will be plugged into Omnicom’s recently launched data-driven campaign management tool, Living Segments.

As a theoretical example of how the marketing programs can be used together, campaign managers for a sports-related brand will be able to see how ads are currently performing at individual sports sites in Fox’s network. In other words, they will not have to rely on third-party researchers with visitor or click statistics that, upon arrival, are sometimes weeks old. Media buyers could then target specific sites with ad buys or bids for a piece of the available inventory.

Matt Spiegel, CEO, OMG Digital, suggested that he foresees his team using the real-time data more to map out campaigns in a targeted manner than to alter already in-play initiatives on the fly. “The more we can inform the planning process with digitally driven data that’s real-time and granular, it’s certainly allows us to present to our brand clients with more targeted opportunities for them to invest in that space,” he said.

The new partnership should arm his New York-based company’s media buyers with data for a sizable chunk of the online advertising landscape. For August, comScore ranked FAN as the sixth-biggest ad network, producing almost 158 million unique visitors.

Meanwhile, the announcement came on the heels of more sobering news for the Omnicom Group, which reported a third-quarter drop in net income of roughly 22 percent to $166 million, compared with earnings of $214 million in 2008. For the first nine months, profit fell to approximately $564 million from $730 million over the same period last year.