NEW YORK ? A Major League Baseball executive at IAB?s Innovation Days conference said that the organization is seeing a lot more consumers buying baseball tickets via mobile.

During the ?Increasing Ad Spend ROI: Put Audience Targeting to Work and Deliver Personalized Advertising? session, executives from MLB and Quantcast presented a case study on how the sports organization is benefiting from real-time advertising. Additionally, the session presented a look at how the MLB breaks down campaigns by specific baseball teams.

?The goal is to drive online ticket sales and to increase return on ad spend,? said Barbara McHugh, senior director of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, New York.

?We decided to work with Quantcast to measure the audience that is more likely to buy tickets and are now serving impressions that are most like our current ticket buyers,? she said.

Ticket driver
Ms. McHugh said that MLB currently has 28 teams that have mobile-friendly ticket flows, and the company is seeing mobile traffic increase for its site.

MLB has 30 teams in different markets that all offer different prices that depend on how well a team is playing each year. However, by using unique lookalike models, the company is able to better target users via display ads.

Each team has their own marketing strategies in place and may include either an agency or in-house work. 

Eight MLB teams have worked with Quantcast on online campaigns to increase ticket sales. To collect data, Quantcast tags portions of a team?s Web pages with pixels.

Ms. McHugh claims that since working with Quantcast in 2011, the company is seeing a 27:1 ROI.

Thirty-five percent of conversions from these campaigns come from users who are MLB members but have not bought tickets from the team?s Web site. Eight percent of the conversions are for new ticket buyers who have never visited a MLB site.

On average, 45 percent of conversions are made within one day of seeing a Quantcast display ad. Fifty-six percent of conversions are made within two days.

Real-time ads
Jag Duggal, vice president of product management at Quantcast, San Francisco, also spoke on the panel about the role of real-time display advertising.

The ultimate goal of real-time display advertising is to drive search-like displays that will eventually impact channels such as mobile.

However, real-time display advertising is too new of a channel to completely figure out yet.

As an example, Mr. Duggal compared the medium to the basic ads that first ran during ?I Love Lucy,? which was one of the first prime-time hit TV shows.

At the time, TV was still new for both consumers and advertisers. However, brands knew that it was a hot place to be in and started to experiment with advertising.

Marketers need to understand that each ad impression is different and needs to be treated differently, per the Quantast exec.

Evaluating campaigns only on clicks is not an effective measure of success because clicks do not necessarily equal conversions.

Search advertising gives marketers an exact idea of what a consumer is interested in with specific keywords.

Compared to search advertising however, display can be trickier because consumers are not necessarily giving out strong signals on what they are interested in while reading news online or browsing through their Facebook account. To make up for the gap, marketers can use data to make advertising relevant.

?It is important to understand that there are new rules that lead to success,? Mr. Duggal said. ?In a world of big data, the amount of data does matter.?

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York