Guest author Chris Talintyre is Head of Audience Development & Activation at Factory Media and talks about the power of understanding huge audiences in real-time and the opportunities it’s bringing to leading brands targeting sports enthusiasts.

As consumers increasingly share content, it’s creating a huge amount of data to analyse giving us insight on not just our readers (think boarders, skaters, surfers, BMXers) but their friends, colleagues and contacts. We can better understand and connect with them through really engaging content, such as the recent work we did with HTC One and the creation of a free world-class skate park at Selfridges.

Given the prestige of the brands we work with, the services we offer must be as cutting-edge as possible. Programmatic platforms are growing rapidly and now account for 28% of the UK display ad market due to their engagement and target abilities. This is what encouraged us to further engage fans and stay ahead of the competition. To do that, we partnered with RadiumOne, experts in programmatic advertising, and created an ‘audience insight’ tool.

Based on RadiumOne technology, it helps us to understand our 22 million strong audience, while giving us extended insight on the global reach of our connected audience – a huge 250 million people – which is pretty informative! We partnered with RadiumOne as we were impressed with the level of sophistication and in-depth insight it could give us on our audience. Our clients come from a diverse range of sectors, and want to be aligned to an active ‘outdoorsy’ audience. Bringing clients into markets they may not naturally integrate into, is a valuable offering for us.

Working with RadiumOne we’ve been able to aggregate at scale, in real-time, sharing activity to build a map of interaction (by using their sharing widget and link shortener). We can track all sharing touch points not just for interactions but more general interactions across the web, for instance, what a user shares more broadly with their friends and contacts. This is in very granular detail and can be right down to the last item bought.

This is where native and programmatic cleverly works in tandem. By packaging up content on behalf of one of our sponsors, into an ad unit (such as a competition or social feed) we can create an engaging experience for the reader. The reach of this content can go much further by also sending it to our readers’ connected audience. We do this based on the preferences made and websites visited by them, so we can serve them with different forms of advertising. It’s engagement in context.

Ultimately, this host of technologies help magnify campaigns to reach more people. Our campaigns are visual, and the audience is vast so we need to tap into every degree of interest through this repertoire of technology. We saw the market opportunity for native and programmatic – now we’re offering an increasingly attractive proposition to leading brands. It was a no brainer for us and we haven’t looked back. We’re excited about winning new business and embracing the other opportunities it will afford us.

HTC One Skatepark Trade Media Video – hires a Skateboarding video by Factory Media

Factory Media is Europe’s largest specialist sports media owner. We focus on bike, board and outdoor sports and work with some of the most recognisable brands in the world such as Nike, British Airways, Jeep and O2.

Chris Talintyre is a media marketing specialist with over 15 years industry experience. With skills ranging from digital marketing, video, direct marketing, subscriptions, through to social media. Currently working within action sports, developing off and online assets to effectively monetise them and extending brand reach.