Media Solutions: The Data Signal Advantage
Our Media Solutions team explores how smarter data signals and automation can help brands stand out in a crowded media landscape. We learn why unique data sources can unlock a competitive advantage beyond budget alone.
The media landscape today
UK advertisers have never spent more; total UK ad spend is forecast to pass £50 billion in 2026 for the first time,1 with digital now accounting for around 86% of every pound spent2. Additionally, 85% of digital ads receive less than 2.5 seconds of attention.3
It's never been harder to stand out.
That scale of investment is great news, but it increasingly means that everyone is fishing in the same pond, with the same platforms, the same automated bidding tools, and, increasingly, the same AI-driven optimisation.
Media Solutions can help our clients create a point of differentiation by finding the right data sets, automation and latest tech to outthink their competitors.
So, what do Media Solutions do?
Powered by a mixture of APIs, AI and emerging tech, our bespoke solutions give clients a competitive edge to solve their unique challenges in media. Almost everything that we build falls into one of three buckets:
- Process: creating bespoke tools that simplify execution and automate the work that drains teams.
An example of this would be our work in aggregating social listening data, ad spend, category trends, search volume and website performance to create a bespoke and holistic view of the B&Q market that would otherwise take hours.
- Emerging tech: we make emerging tech explorable. Test, learn and scale when it works.
We have recently created a workflow for Tesco to use the latest Gen AI tech to test personalised lifestyle images rather than standard product images. A test on a small number of products in one campaign can be used as a proof of concept to begin an impactful innovation project at scale.
- Signals: building richer signals so activation can adapt to each customer in real time.
The next section delves further into this category and how Media Solutions can reframe some of our client challenges.
Data signals: small data, bigger edge
It's tempting to think that the advantage only comes from big, expensive datasets. In practice, some of the best-performing activity we've built has come from a single, well-chosen signal that nobody else was using. We're spending more time exploring complementary datasets to audience signals. For example, ways to approximate mood or context for a campaign moment (a big weather event, a music event or a cost-of-living data point) without relying on personal or sensitive data at all. The opportunity comes from knowing more about the moment.
There's no single dataset that works for every brand.
- The most useful signal for a telecoms client could be network outage data from Downdetector API
- Which would be very different to the data we would find in the SkyScanner API or ExchangeRate API that we might explore to get flight volumes or FX rates for a travel client.
- We could even explore NHBC or Zoopla data for new build warranty registrations or listing data for a house builder.
The opportunity is vast, and that's where Media Solutions comes in. Across the many sectors we work in, we maintain a growing map of available public and commercial data sources, and we're always looking for the next one nobody has activated yet. If you're planning for a client and want to know what's out there for their sector, it’s worth considering what could work for you.
We’ve seen it work many times before
The broadband market is saturated, and people rarely consider switching providers. That is, unless something goes wrong with their current one. We built a system that detects competitor network outages in real time from the Downdetector API, pinpoints the affected location, and deploys a focused ad burst to reach customers at exactly the moment they're most open to switching.
It's a small example, but it makes the point: the win didn't come from a bigger budget or a new platform. It came from one overlooked data source, connected to media in a way nobody had done before.
Let's find yours
If you're working on a pitch, a review or just want to know what data might be hiding in plain sight for your client's sector, come and talk to Media Solutions.
Get in touch: amplifi_product_innovation@dentsu.com.
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