The days of direct relationships in TV ad buying aren’t over yet.
On Wednesday, CTV ad buying platform Madhive announced a partnership with TV identity resolution company Blockgraph for a more direct connection to media supply.
Madhive, which secured a $300 million investment from Goldman Sachs in June, wants closer relationships with media sellers so it can access more viewing data that will help its advertisers reach their target audience, said Luc Dumont, the company’s SVP of business development.
But it’s a buy-side company at its core, Dumont said, and Madhive’s main goal is to get new data to attract more advertiser clients.
The privacy pickle
Still, as more privacy laws and regulations sprout up, it’s only getting harder for ad tech companies and their clients to access the audience and viewing data that can help improve campaign effectiveness.
For instance, privacy clampdowns are limiting the availability of IP addresses and automatic content recognition data – both commonly used identifiers for targeting and measurement.
But more direct ties between the buy and sell sides should help increase match rates and improve reach and frequency, despite the impending doom cloud of signal loss, said Blockgraph Co-Founder and CEO Jason Manningham.
Unseen potential
Blockgraph is rich in TV viewership data because it’s jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Paramount.
It has access to household identifiers from programming distributors, such as hashed emails and IP addresses, which media sellers can add to bid requests. Advertisers using Madhive’s DSP to buy inventory will be able to match their own first-party data with data from media sellers through Blockgraph, in addition to Madhive’s own audience graph.
That level of audience matching is kosher only with clean room technology. (Speaking of, Blockgraph launched a data clean room product in 2021 designed to match household IDs to TV ad exposures.)
And if advertisers have a better idea of which households they’ve already reached, they can put more of their media spend behind reaching new households, which they can find through Blockgraph.
Branching out
Sellers can also benefit from using Madhive’s data to extend campaign reach for their own advertiser clients.
Many TV programming distributors already use Blockgraph for identity resolution. The problem is that they have limited addressable inventory to sell since most ad inventory within a TV content aggregator belongs to the content owners (aka, the streaming apps on a smart TV).
Now, distributors will be able to tap Madhive to find their viewers on other TV or streaming platforms and extend campaign reach for their advertiser clients by including those other platforms.
It may sound like distributors are sending their brand clients to the competition, but that’s not what’s happening, said Kemal Bokhari, head of data, measurement and analytics at DISH. In this case, DISH would buy rival ad inventory from Madhive and repackage it to its advertisers. That way, buyers can target their audiences both on DISH and “on other platforms we don’t have access to,” Bokhari said, which should result in incremental reach and, therefore, overall higher inventory yield for TV distributors like DISH.
Buying multiple sources of ad inventory in one place is also more time and cost efficient for advertisers, which is why Bokhari said DISH expects to win new advertiser clients as a result of this tech integration.
If more brands believe that TV can help them achieve broader reach without skimping on targeting, Bokhari said, then they’ll buy more TV ads, simple as that.
