Media Buying Briefing: How a medical insights company is shaping media planning and buying with its data

In the age of COVID, the more health-related information a marketer has access to, the better.

Kinsa, a health tech company that’s created a connected thermometer, is using data feedback to inform media plans from health marketers and their agencies to ramp up its enterprise side of the business. The company has helped multiple health-related brands, from cold and flu medications to tissue makers, optimize their media spend, working directly with the brands as well as their media agencies. Kinsa is also selling its data to retailers getting into the media sales business — and which one isn’t these days?

I spoke with Kinsa’s cmo Andy Yost as well as vp of data science John Zicker about their work with brands, agencies and retailers.

The following has been edited for clarity and condensed for space.

What makes Kinsa’s data different?

Andy Yost: What’s unique about us is our predictive real-time illness insights allow us to work with consumer packaged goods brands to fuel smarter business decisions around media planning, but also around supply-chain management decisions. It allows them to get ahead of where illness is striking and take action quickly. An early strategic advantage for us over others is our ability to collect three key data sets: where illness starts — people who are using our product before going to the doctor; how fast illness is spreading; and understanding illness severity. Those three unique inputs have really helped us create a very interesting and compelling offering for enterprises, like the packaged goods industry.

With whom do you share that data, and what’s the process for sharing it?

Yost: There’s a range of ways that we’re working with consumer packaged goods companies. We identify the brands that this is most relevant to cold and flu [remedy] manufacturers, talking to CMOS and brand managers of those companies. We also work with their agencies, particularly around media spend and media optimization. And we’re having conversations with retailers, which are working with these brands to make sure that products are on the shelves where illness is spiking. It’s also led us to interesting partnerships with players like The Trade Desk, where we’re able to help our brands and our agency partners make more effective decisions around their media spend.

How do you gather the data and make it ready for prime time for brands and agencies?

John Zicker: We’re collecting information in the household at the time of need, which all marketers really care about. Somebody feels feverish, they grab the thermometer, and then it opens up a conversation where we collect other symptoms — cough, headaches, chills, body aches, those types of things. Using that, we then can combine it and match that up with whatever [brand or marketer] we’re working with. The other thing is, unlike publicly available data about illness, we aggregate that into DMAs, which [is] how marketers think — as opposed to the whole state or the whole nation. So it’s better targeting.

What brands have you specifically helped? And how did your data impact …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron