A single Media Rating Council audit can take thousands of man hours and cost tens of thousands of dollars depending on a vendor’s size and the complexity of its offering. It’s a long and rigorous process – which is why the MRC doesn’t take suspending or withdrawing a company’s seal of approval lightly, said George […]
In the wake of Nielsen losing its National and Local TV accreditation from the Media Rating Council, networks are eyeing alternative measurement companies. Sitting within many of these data sets is automated content recognition (ACR) tech. ACR tech captures and interprets audio and video snippets on a TV, helping data companies understand the totality of […]
Data clean rooms are secure – that’s the whole point. But they’re not always flexible or scalable, said Jason Manninghan, CEO of advanced TV data platform Blockgraph, which is jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS. TV advertisers in particular need a wide range of capabilities in order to tie media spend with viewing and campaign […]
VideoAmp is getting its shot to take on Nielsen. ViacomCBS tapped the measurement company to guarantee media buys. VideoAmp will measure TV campaigns based on traditional age and gender demographics for linear TV. It will also guarantee advanced audiences. The move marks yet another shift away from the industry’s reliance on Nielsen as the dominant […]
The Media Rating Council stripped Nielsen of its National TV ratings accreditation Wednesday and formally denied its request for a hiatus after the measurement giant underreported viewers during the pandemic. Nielsen asked the MRC last month to put its accreditation on hold in order to address issues with its panels and focus on the development […]
Linear and addressable are getting a little love from Unified ID 2.0. On Friday, Blockgraph announced plans to work with The Trade Desk to help advertisers activate first-party and deliver targeted ads across convergent TV platforms. Blockgraph is the fruit of a joint venture between Comcast’s FreeWheel, Charter and ViacomCBS that provides secure infrastructure so […]
Digital ad tech companies are making their play to control advertising on CTV. But it’s not easy to become a star of the big screen. Ad tech companies that make it big in CTV must earn their spot in a few ways. First, they must understand the supply constraints of CTV and find their niche. […]
If addressability and cross-platform are the two most important TV buzzwords today, FreeWheel’s latest pilot is killing two birds with one stone. Comcast and Charter are using FreeWheel tech to chop up linear TV ad spots to make it “audience addressable,” across both linear and digital. Instead of the same ad being shown to all […]
TransUnion is partnering with Blockgraph, builder of pipes for addressable television, so that advertisers can use its identity data to target, reach and measure TV households across channels. Through the partnership, announced on Thursday, advertisers and media companies can access data through Tru Optik, the data marketplace and DMP TransUnion acquired in October; use the […]
Fox Corporation is aggressively pushing to make Tubi, the streaming ad-supported platform it picked up for $440 million last year, a billion-dollar AVOD business in just a few years. On the company’s Q2 earnings call, CEO Lachlan Murdoch laid out a bold agenda for the streaming platform, saying that Fox would continue to invest heavily […]
Super Bowl LV will look pretty different on and off the field when the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers square off Sunday. While 186.6 million people are expected to tune in this year, according to the National Retail Federation, the COVID-19 pandemic is also playing a big role in how advertisers are adjusting […]
Despite falling short of earnings-per-share estimates in Q4 2020, Netflix’s stock popped Tuesday after beating on revenue and the news that it’s nearing free cash flow profitability. Netflix also reached a new milestone in 2020 with the addition of 37 million net new subscribers. Netflix now has more than 200 million subs worldwide. But Netflix […]
Could addressable ads for live nationally broadcast linear TV be coming soon? Incremental progress in that direction happened Thursday when ViacomCBS and DISH Media each said that they have successfully tested the first addressable campaign within a live national broadcast through an MVPD set-top box. The companies partnered with TV ad tech company Adcuratio to […]
Vizio and Samsung, watch out, because LG, the second-largest TV manufacturer in the world, is breaking itself off a little piece of ad tech. On Tuesday, the South Korean electronics company announced an $80 million investment – and a controlling stake – in TV data provider Alphonso. This is the first time Alphonso has taken […]
At the start of 2020, video streaming giant Roku’s upfront deck predicted consumer time spent viewing streaming TV would surpass traditional linear over a period of five years. Instead they did so in a year, fueled in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It is a fundamental shift in viewership,” said Alison Levin, Roku’s VP […]
TV measurement is hamstrung by household-level data. Despite the scale of set-top box and smart TV data, there’s no easy way to connect ad exposure on a television to a specific person within a household. “And if you don’t break TV data down to the person, it’s very difficult to do cross-media measurement or run […]
Smart TV manufacturer Vizio is reorganizing to bring more television data into its advertising and content business. Inscape, Vizio’s data and automatic content recognition (ACR) subsidiary, has been combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast, Vizio’s smart TV content platform. The three will now function as a single unit. Prior to the strategic reorg, announced on […]
Bringing online buying practices to OTT isn’t as simple as plugging in a buying platform and revving it up. If a display ad doesn’t load or an online video buffers on a browser, it’s annoying. If an ad on the big glass doesn’t show properly, it breaks the user experience. NBCU knows these quality control […]
Self-serve interfaces are old hat in the digital world. But they’re relatively new to TV buyers who struggle with the planning, buying and measurement of audience-based campaigns. Ampersand, the Comcast/Cox/Charter joint ad sales venture previously known as NCC Media, is trialing a self-serve version of the AND platform, its advanced TV planning interface that treats […]
The video ad server and SSP SpotX boosted its addressable TV capabilities Tuesday by upgrading its platform, which can now replace linear ads on smart TVs in real time. This function can be enabled by content owners working through Project OAR, an open standard led by TV manufacturer VIZIO and whose founding members include AMC […]
This ain’t no papercut. Roughly 6.6 million United States households will cut the cord this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast on pay TV trends, released Monday. That’s a 7.5% year-over-year decline, the biggest drop eMarketer has observed. And the picture doesn’t get much rosier for broadcast TV. By 2024, more than one-third of all […]
TV data science company EDO released an insights platform Thursday designed to help brands, agencies and broadcasters better plan linear TV campaigns and understand how effectively those campaigns drive search engagement. The platform, called Ad EnGage, contains a module that provides competitive intelligence – where advertisers can see where competitors placed their own TV ads […]
Peacock’s exclusive launch window for advertisers will end this fall, as it opens up a portion of its inventory to a wider group of brands starting in Q4. The NBCUniversal-owned streaming service launched on July 15 with 10 advertisers, including Target, Unilever and Verizon, who received category exclusivity and the ability to test new ad […]
AT&T is reportedly exploring a sale of Xandr, the ad tech unit it launched in 2018 with lofty ambitions to transform the TV advertising industry with data and automation. The talks are still preliminary and a deal may not go through, per The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news. Xandr made a big splash […]
The Trade Desk’s stock was up nearly 5% in after-hour’s trading on Thursday, despite posting a 13% year-over-over dip in revenue in the second quarter. To what does TTD owe this optimism? Two words: connected TV. “We believe that the COVID pandemic has permanently accelerated the growth of CTV,” CEO Jeff Green told investors on […]
Roku did way better than the TV ad market at large in Q2, despite a major pullback in ad spend from brands across the board. Platform revenues, which include advertising, grew 46% YoY to $244.8 million, Roku said Wednesday during its Q2 earnings call. Overall, revenues increased 42% YoY to $356 million in the quarter. […]
Brands are pumped about the connected TV opportunity. But without the ability to measure campaigns with the same level of granularity as they can on digital channels, “CTV is not quite as fun as we want it to be,” said Scott Symonds, a managing partner at WPP digital agency AKQA. “A high-attention platform like you […]
The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on AT&T and WarnerMedia are far reaching, totaling $2.8 billion in the second quarter alone. Overall, AT&T revenue declined 9% YoY to $45 billion in Q2. CEO John Stankey expects the effects of the coronavirus to become the “business norm well into next year.” AT&T’s WarnerMedia division took the […]
Netflix will spend less on marketing this year in part due to COVID-19 – but the streaming platform was planning on moving in that direction anyway. “In terms of the march toward less traditional media, we’ve been on that for some time,” said Netflix chief content officer and newly appointed co-CEO Ted Sarandos on the company’s […]
As TV networks launch or acquire ad-supported streaming services (AVOD), they have a big opportunity to reinvent the broken ad experience for both viewers and media buyers. And while these networks have the opportunity to bring their AVOD learnings back to linear, the OTT networks can also learn a lesson or two from the linear […]
