Home Digital TV and Video Adap.tv’s PrecisionDemand Buy A Bid For Linear TV

Adap.tv’s PrecisionDemand Buy A Bid For Linear TV

SHARE:

AOL’s Adap.tv will acquire Jon Mandel’s PrecisionDemand, a TV ad-targeting company that mines set-top box data and layers it with first-party data.

In a Wednesday blog post outlining the acquisition, Adap.tv’s Toby Gabriner wrote: “Integrated into Adap.tv’s programmatic buying and selling platforms and, eventually, ONE by AOL, PrecisionDemand will be a key component of our advanced TV targeting, attribution and optimization technology available in the market.” (Read the blog post.)

Programmatic buying is also a big part of AOL’s video initiatives; during its recent digital NewFront, the company said its original content, AOL Originals, and all reserve inventory would be available its Adap.tv platform. But although Adap.tv has pushed into this space via the Audience Path programmatic buying platform it rolled out in March, buying inventory on digital video is different from placing ads on linear TV. PrecisionDemand is designed to facilitate the latter.

AOL is testing its ad stack on linear TV, said Bob Lord, president of AOL Platforms, during a brand and agency forum AOL hosted Wednesday.

In addition to demographic data, PrecisionDemand “uses first-party data, target[s] real consumers and find[s] them by going many hundreds of variables deep” because traditional demographic targeting can be “statistically random,” PrecisionDemand CEO Jon Mandel told AdExchanger in January.

Adap.tv hopes to connect consumer purchases back to specific TV ads, “not just the usual media mix modeling that is used today,” Adap.tv’s Gabriner continued. AOL’s recent acquisition of marketing attribution provider Convertro for $101 million also strengthens this initiative. AOL has expressed on many recent occasions its strategy and vision of taking a “platform” approach to media buying.

Although the company is gunning for linear TV ad dollars, only a limited amount of this inventory is available to third-party ad networks or exchanges. A recently published report from video ad server FreeWheel indicated premium programmer content is still bought and sold largely direct. AOL hopes targeting enhancements to Adap.tv, via PrecisionDemand, can loosen more supply.

 

Must Read

Publishers Feel Seen At The Google Ad Tech Antitrust Trial

Publishers were encouraged to see the DOJ highlight Google’s stranglehold on the ad server market and its attempts to weaken header bidding.

Albert Thompson, Managing Director, Digital at Walton Isaacson

To Cure What Ails Digital Advertising, Marketers And Publishers Must Get Back To Basics

Albert Thompson, a buy-side veteran with 20+ years of experience, weighs in on attention metrics, the value of MFA sites, brand safety backlash and how publishers can improve their inventory.

A comic depiction of Google's ad machine sucking money out of a publisher.

DOJ vs. Google, Day Five Rewind: Prebid Reality Check, Unfair Rev Share And Jedi Blue (Sorta)

Someone will eventually need to make a Netflix-style documentary about the Google ad tech antitrust trial happening in Virginia. (And can we call it “You’ve Been Ad Served?”)

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Alphabet Soup

Buried DOJ Evidence Reveals How Google Dealt With The Trade Desk

In the process of the investigation into Google, the Department of Justice unearthed a vast trove of separate evidence. Some of these findings paint a whole new picture of how Google interacts and competes with its main DSP rival, The Trade Desk.

Comic: The Unified Auction

DOJ vs. Google, Day Four: Behind The Scenes On The Fraught Rollout Of Unified Pricing Rules

On Thursday, the US district court in Alexandria, Virginia boarded a time machine back to April 18, 2019 – the day of a tense meeting between Google and publishers.

Google Ads Will Now Use A Trusted Execution Environment By Default

Confidential matching – which uses a TEE built on Google Cloud infrastructure – will now be the default setting for all uses of advertiser first-party data in Customer Match.