Challenge

City of Hope faced a major question: How could they bring emerging and traditional TV channels together effectively, all while accommodating patients’ desires to stay closer to home for cancer treatments?

Approach

Each channel received unique care and considerations to accommodate differences in capabilities, audiences, and data availability. Several common tools and analytics solutions were implemented to measure success across the key KPIs to optimize and improve performance across addressable TV, connected TV, linear TV, and display media campaigns. 

• Identity resolution with Merkury: City of Hope’s ultimate marketing goal is for patients to schedule an appointment to receive life-saving care. That typically happens online or over the phone, in a completely separate ecosystem from TV and display ads. Merkury, as an identity resolution platform, enabled the team to identify converting and non-converting individuals and their customer journeys in an anonymized way – connecting online and offline touchpoints from an ad view all the way to a conversion with City of Hope. 

• Closed-loop reporting and 1:1 attribution: Closed-loop reporting enhanced customer journey data by bringing in TV impression data that was otherwise unavailable. This data, combined with the data in Merkury, fed into 1:1 attribution modeling to assign value to each touchpoint in the user journey. By seeing each engagement’s true contribution to conversion-focused KPIs, the team could target optimizations and allocate budget appropriately. 

• Sophisticated modeling: Beyond attribution modeling, City of Hope also used a machine learning model for linear TV to estimate the likelihood of a conversion event being driven by a TV spot. It incorporated factors like the time between when the spot aired and when the conversion occurred, historical time-of-day conversion patterns, audience size, and DMA (or geography).  This showed which TV spots produced the highest response rates, helping to make linear TV campaigns a performance-driving marketing tactic.  

• Data clean rooms: As a healthcare organization, HIPAA compliance is critical for City of Hope. Data clean rooms provided a privacy-safe way to marry their first-party data, Merkle’s data, and TV impression logs – ultimately powering the identity resolution and reporting that enabled their success. 

• Proven tactics applied to new campaigns: Addressable TV, connected TV, and display were all new channels for City of Hope over the last several years. The team used learnings from other channels, like proven third-party audiences and ideal ad frequency, for a successful launch.  Implementing historically successful strategies for new campaign launches allowed City of Hope to scale early, which led to increases in reach and conversion volume. 

• First-party data: City of Hope’s first-party data was important for creating holistic views of the customer in Merkury. It also played a critical role in analyzing patient travel patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic to focus ad investment and efforts on the right geographies.