Australian research company Roy Morgan has launched an intuitive budget allocation app it says optimises campaign budgets across media channels.

Chief digital officer Howard Seccombe says that while many newer channels boast huge audience numbers – think Netflix or Spotify – the real question is how much of the audience can you actually reach with an ad.

“For example, a streaming service may reach millions, but if 80 per cent are on ad-free plans, then the ad-addressable audience is much smaller,” he says.

The new ad-addressable reach metric segments a channel’s total audience reach by those that can see advertising.

But given that it’s not just how many people you can reach, it’s how often they return and how deeply they engage, new quality-of-audience metrics – ‘audience loyalty’ and ‘audience engagement’ – assess the depth of relationship between the channel and the audience.

Behind the new app is Roy Morgan’s AI-powered WorkSpace platform. Seccombe says the AI engine enables the selection of a target audience by searching more than 100,000 ready-made consumer profiles using Roy Morgan Single Source, uploading 1st party data, or using Helix Personas.

“For each media channel, the AI engine shows the target audience’s total and ad-addressable reach, ‘loyalty’ and ‘engagement’ performance, a recommended budget allocation and whether the allocation is above or below the industry average.

Seccombe says when the company embarked on the project, media agency clients were really keen to understand the ad-addressable component of each channel, particularly for the newer streaming platforms. “At the same time the concept of a simple, data-led application to help allocate media budgets was well received, especially when it challenged the status quo,” he said.

“There was also high demand for a range of quality-of-audience metrics to enable planners to make smarter investment decisions.

“And for many of our media owner clients these same metrics enabled the value of their audiences to really shine.”