Cancer Treatment Center of America® (CTCA) expanded into display to move beyond TV. Learn how Merkle used closed-loop reporting to attribute omnichannel behavior and performance without needing cookies.

Consumers continue to cut ties with cable companies in favor of streamed content, making national TV a less attractive marketing channel every year. Knowing the landscape was changing, CTCA expanded into connected TV and addressable TV but sought other channels that would complement them to engage patients via an omnichannel strategy.

CTCA activated a display campaign to increase cross-device message frequency on contextually relevant inventory, with the goal of increasing CTCA’s patient volume in key markets. CTCA fueled its omnichannel, cross-device strategy with a proven audience from its advanced TV campaigns. The primary KPI was to efficiently drive prospective patients to their locations, but that first required engagement via their website and/or call center.

CTCA leveraged Merkle’s closed loop reporting to evaluate the display campaign as part of an omnichannel strategy, which allows for 1:1 view through and click through conversion attribution. The team accomplished this with impression log-level data that identified the households exposed to media, enabling attribution across devices to non-digital interactions from the households without using cookies. That information was then joined with de-identified first-party data from CTCA to overlap engagement from the brand with media campaigns.

Closed-loop reporting provides attribution that is a better reflection of the media campaign’s performance, as it considers all households that were exposed regardless of device, mode (offline or online), or type of engagement with the brand. The approach accurately conveys and evaluates the interaction of CTCA’s display campaign with various other channels (connected TV, addressable TV, digital out-of-home, streaming audio, etc.), like a multi-touch attribution model that leveraged both digital and offline engagement. This enables performance and data-driven media campaign optimization to improve marketing efficiency as well as effectiveness.

Using 1:1 closed-loop attribution, CTCA confidently jumped into programmatic display with a measurement strategy that showed incremental patient acquisition via both view through and click through conversions and enabled campaign optimization. The success of a well-planned and executed display media has allowed CTCA to significantly grow its presence across all screens, reach an incremental yet targeted audience, and meet cost-per-patient acquisition goals.