AXP American Express Company

By Steven Perlberg 

Networks are hawking more than their fall seasons at their annual "upfront" presentations. TV companies want marketers and ad buyers to know they have data chops, too.

To that end, Viacom is announcing a new data product in partnership with American Express that the cable giant says will let advertisers better target consumers across their stable of networks like MTV, VH1 and Comedy Central. Viacom is unveiling the product as broadcast network owners make their case to the advertising community during the upfronts this week.

The tool, called Vantage Intent, will go beyond the company's current suite of data products by using American Express' vast trove of purchase data to help advertisers predict when consumers might be in the market for a certain product, according to Kern Schireson, executive vice president of data strategy and consumer intelligence at Viacom.

Mr. Schireson offered a familiar example in the world of targeted advertising: pet food. Dog food marketers understandably try to use available data sets to target consumers who actually own dogs. But Mr. Schireson says American Express can help Viacom find viewers who are making purchases that foreshadow pet ownership, like supplies for a new apartment, months before that viewer adopts Fido.

"We can link it to what they are actually viewing and give a solution that is quite unique," said Manish Gupta, executive vice president of global information management and data products at American Express. The data will be anonymized and pooled together to protect privacy, he said, and Viacom doesn't get its hands on anyone's personal information.

Viacom is among a handful of TV companies boasting that they can offer marketers and advertisers targeting capabilities that compete with the digital world. But most television ad inventory is still bought and sold the old-fashioned way, based on traditional TV ratings that figure for only broad categories like age and gender.

Viacom, in particular, has promoted its data-targeting abilities amid those gloomier trends in the pay-TV business, like falling ratings and cord-cutting. In March, Viacom signed a deal with measurement specialist comScore to help power its targeted advertising products. Viacom's advertising revenue in the U.S. fell 5% in the latest quarter.

The American Express deal "is more sophisticated and more advanced than anything we've done before," Mr. Schireson said.

Write to Steven Perlberg at steven.perlberg@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 17, 2016 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)

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