Solution

A+E Networks Custom Sales Solutions team successfully recruited and fostered a dedicated audience panel which provides insights, as needed, including at the start and end of the sales cycle, from uncovering partnership synergies and potential fit of A+E Networks brands with advertiser clients through to assessing advertising effectiveness metrics post-campaign. Custom Sales Solutions also offers up its trio of Alida communities as a resource to other parts of the organization looking for a quick-turn, cost-efficient solution to help gather insights.

Redesigning the panels to reflect A+E Networks' changing audience

In 2024, the Alida panels were rebuilt, through deep profiling and a comprehensive recruitment plan designed to reflect the diversity of the viewing audience in terms of gender identity, race and ethnicity, age, and preferred methods of watching/interacting with A&E, HISTORY, and Lifetime, including via the company’s extensive portfolio of FAST channels, and social media. 

With community as the core of their research program, they’ve gathered insights to support advertising partners and the ad sales team in several ways:

Supporting ad sales pitches

A+E Networks has found that gathering unique insights from the panels, especially the voices of the viewers themselves, has helped craft more impactful sales pitch materials. The panels empower the team to find deeper synergies between advertisers, viewers, and content, and to ask questions that go beyond what is available in major market research tools, deepening their knowledge. Clients especially love the quotes from panelists. Including individuals' voices helps to humanize viewers and give life to numerical datapoints. Further, the power of Alida as an always-on tool, coupled with engaged panelists, means that when time is short, the team can still field quick surveys and deliver insights in as little as 24 hours.

Evaluating campaign performance

Alida is a valuable tool for evaluating the impact of custom campaign content and collecting feedback to improve future campaigns. Via forced exposure studies, the team can assess the effects of custom creative on advertiser KPIs such as brand favorability, consideration, recommendation, and likelihood to take an action, along with deeper insights on the campaign’s communication of key attributes and brand synergies. Open-ended feedback plays a key role in these studies and allows the team to uncover how respondents felt about the partnership overall, in their own words, along with learnings that could boost future performance further. 

The team is also focused on media segmentation within their panel, and specifically leveraging these segments to conduct research that is more reflective of A+E Networks viewers’ preferences for consuming content from its portfolio of brands. Using Alida’s profiling and programming capabilities, the team has developed segmentations to serve different types of campaign content based on where viewers typically watch – whether on linear, digital, social, or a combination of platforms - for more tailored insights based on natural viewing preferences.

Results

A+E Networks' small but mighty Custom Sales Solutions team can keep up with the media group's dispersed distribution, gathering insights on custom campaign content across all platforms.

In a very short time, the team has reinvigorated their community, increased engagement rates, and increased the value to their organization. The time to produce research insights has been cut in half and today, A+E Networks can typically run a research study a week or less, at times producing results in under 24 hours.

A+E Networks Custom Sales Solutions team has garnered significant savings in less than one year by reducing external sample costs, leveraging organic recruitment opportunities, and self-managing programming and QA testing within the Alida platform.

Moving forward the goal is to continually innovate the panels to reflect both the evolution of audiences and means of engaging with A&E, HISTORY, and Lifetime brand partners.