OUTCOME
ORIENTED
AMC Networks Redefines Innovation
By Cathy Applefeld Olson
A few years ago, upfront season was abuzz about data clean rooms and the ability for agencies to work directly with advertisers to securely match and combine first-party data with other datasets. What wasn’t discussed as much was how cumbersome it could be to optimize clean room functionality so that data could freely flow and inform campaigns.
Enter AMC Networks Outcomes, an offering the company rolled out earlier this year that simplifies the process, speeds the delivery of campaign insights directly to advertisers and enables them to immediately use those insights to inform campaign optimization. Built into AMCN’s Audience+ data and insights platform, Outcomes enables partners to view campaign performance, across all platforms, in real-time based on their desired consumer outcomes and provides a deeper understanding of audiences beyond transactional data.
“We found one of the biggest hurdles was getting access to the data from the buy side, the agency getting the advertiser to work with their data scientists within that large company and figure out how to connect first party data with the agency and then back to us as a programmer,” says Evan Adlman, EVP of commercial sales & revenue operations at AMCN.
“With so much of the demand going into streaming and CTV, and the ability we have as a company to deliver cross-platform for any campaign, we thought it was really important to figure out how to take the burden off the advertiser. To create a way to expose our ad exposure data inside our clean room and figure out how to provide real time or near real time attribution for the campaigns that are running by working with the data providers we used to build a targeted segment.”
Whereas client campaigns were previously adept at mining specific audience segments, that was the extent of the technological proficiency, according to Adlman.
“We would target them, but we never went back to that target audience, that dataset, to see if anything changed,” he says. “A lot of the reports we’ve been relying on as an industry take somewhere between 45, 60, sometimes 70 days to get back. And what are you going to do with the information then? Everybody today is focused on a business outcome. With so much supply in the market, the only way to win for an advertiser is to be able to provide targeting to a specific audience and then be able to tell them what happened in a timely manner.”
Outcomes has already been transformational for brands in the automotive, pharma, CPG and entertainment sectors.
Post Consumer Brands, for one, ran a campaign built with Audience+ that targeted a custom audience segment and ran across a gamut of AMCN inventory. The campaign, which ended Jan. 1, drove increased sales of Fruity Pebbles cereal, as reported by AMCN’s CPG measurement partner NCS Solutions. Households spent 14% more on the cereal after being exposed to an ad, compared to the NCS National Household Panel. And households that saw the ad campaign also maintained a higher spend against Fruity Pebbles even after the campaign ended.
“There’s a lot that can happen, and it’s fairly easy to do now that we’ve built the product,” says Adlman.
Similarly strong results surfaced in campaigns with two different major automakers. For one, the custom audience segment built with Audience+ that was exposed to the campaign purchased new vehicles made by that automaker at a 16.4% higher rate than a control sampling. A specific truck model was a target vehicle of the campaign, and viewers exposed to the campaign purchased 10.8% more of those specific trucks compared to the control sample. For the other, households exposed to the creative purchased new vehicles by this automaker at a 34.9% higher rate than a control sampling. An SUV model was a target vehicle of that case study, and viewers exposed to the AMCN campaign purchased 17.4% more new models of that SUV compared to the control sample.
“AMC is one of our most pioneering partners, consistently on the bleeding edge, delivering unified, cross-platform solutions for advertisers,” says Comcast Advertising President James Rooke. “They are always among the first to raise their hand and test our latest ad tech innovations, and their track record of embracing new innovations gives me confidence in their ability to stay at the forefront of the industry.”
There’s plenty of runway ahead as AMC Networks drills down to educate the market about Outcomes benefits.
“I think we as an industry try to overengineer everything we do, and we can’t use something until it is absolutely perfect. This is a product that works end-to-end. We’ve tested it, we’ve piloted it and it is one of the upfront pillars we offered this year and are closing now,” Adlman says. “I think clients see, ‘This actually works. I can get some really deterministic results. And then there’s so much extra data and analysis that’s provided by us that can really drive other parts of their business.”
Fast Fax
- AMC Networks has more than 30 distribution channels reaching 110 million-plus ad-supported monthly active viewers.
- AMC Networks launched Outcomes in February 2025.
- AMCN clean room and AMCN Outcomes are built on the Snowflake platform.