With the looming threat of privacy crackdowns across the globe – and big platform changes coming – contextual advertising is starting to look pretty good again. And not just on the open web – on TV, too.
On Wednesday, Precise TV, a kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube, announced a partnership with video data platform IRIS.TV to bring its contextual targeting capabilities to television. Precise TV, which focuses on helping advertisers with their performance goals, says its technology is fully compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Precise TV’s technology relies on conversion pixels and six years’ worth of data from many different verticals and clients, including point of sale and contextual conversion data.
“We can match the taxonomy we built for YouTube into connected TV,” said Denis Crushell, chief commercial officer of Precise TV. “And [we’ll] know what content categories will deliver there based on the thousands of campaigns we’ve already run on YouTube.”
Precise TV also has a research panel of about 6,000 families. It’s able to overlay purchase intent data with first-party audience data, but only for campaigns that aren’t serving ads to children.
Ad-supported content for kids remains 100% contextual.
“When media buying dramatically switched to audience-based, everyone stopped working on contextual technology,” said Christian Dankl, co-founder and chairman of Precise TV. “But the kids’ space is the most extreme space for something to go wrong.”
Precise TV started off with a mission to keep kids’ programming safe from brand-unsafe ad content. But the company has branched off into other verticals since its launch in 2015. In December 2021, Precise TV acquired Triton Advertising, a boutique consulting service, to further expand its rolodex of brands and verticals, including travel and tourism, insurance and luxury retail.
Bringing Precise TV’s contextual targeting methodology onto television is where IRIS.TV comes in.
IRIS.TV is a video data platform that uses machine learning to build applications like content recommendation off of underlying information about pieces of content. It makes its margins by taking a CPM fee from publishers and SSPs that use IRIS data to inform ad placement decisioning.
What IRIS.TV brings to the table for Precise is access to more publishers and hence more inventory.
“We have a really strong partnership with IRIS that helps us access content data on a video level with normalized data so we can plug and play,” Dankl said.
On top of that, “IRIS.TV is already integrated with DSPs that support private marketplaces, which means any agency or advertiser in the world that has a DSP can now activate with us,” Dankl said.
In other words, the deal is Precise’s ticket to the big screen in the living room.
“This is a one-stop shop for us to bring our contextual intelligence to market,” Dankl added.
Contextual intelligence is critical for tracking lower-funnel impact on TV, a medium that innately has fewer organic opportunities for engagement than the web (like skippable ads, for example).
Precise TV’s contextual strategy includes an emphasis on performance that drives the business outcomes marketers are looking for. “Advertisers [will be] looking at the full funnel, which I think is missing for a lot of platforms in the market,” said Dankl.
This article has been updated.
