Clypd and SpotX, two sell-side systems for TV and digital publishers, have jointly launched a cross-screen monetization platform for media owners.
TiVo will be the pair’s first data partner, enabling platform users to anonymously match digital ad exposures to national households across TiVo’s 2.5 million set-top boxes.
The goal is to allow an advertiser or media owner to identify concentrations of viewers within the linear environment.
They could then determine which shows over-index with target segments on linear TV using TiVo’s link to addressable households, and retarget them online or on mobile, said Jason Burke, VP of product for clypd.
Here’s how the two work together: Clypd primarily services linear TV broadcasters like Cox Communications and Univision, while SpotX’s sweet spot is digital video publishers.
“As we had separate conversations with media owners, we kept seeing sales teams trying to bring together digital video and TV inventory to offer up more of a holistic offering across screens,” Burke said. “We’ve all talked about cross-screen delivery within the context of digital for years, but tying that capability into the $74 billion TV market is nontrivial.”
Because linear TV has a lot of legacy infrastructure, it’s hard to seamlessly exchange data and signals with digital ad servers and vice versa.
TiVo serves as that linchpin for connecting digital-to-TV data sets in clypd-SpotX’s conjoined publisher platform, said Burke.
“TiVo Research has its own data that comes from TiVo boxes and we license data from cable operators and other aggregators that allows us to tie in very specific aspects [such as] shopper data or car registrations,” Frank Foster, SVP and GM of TiVo Research, told AdExchanger in a recent interview. “We differentiate ourselves through our linkage to other data sources.”
Other TV publishers like DISH Network and Comcast want to bridge the gap between digital environments and their linear and set-top box inventory.
“I don’t think any one company is positioned to develop a solution that is completely end-to-end,” said Randy Cooke, VP of programmatic TV for SpotX. “Collaboration is going to be at the center of creating a functional, long-lasting business for programmatic TV from a technology, measurement and data perspective.”
Cooke pointed to recent alliances, including one between TiVo Research and mobile platform NinthDecimal, that aim to sum up the impact of television viewership on offline sales – the holy grail for advertisers.
Although age and demo targeting is table stakes, it’s important to augment that data with other attributes like the presence of children in a household, income and an understanding of the incremental reach of a publisher audience on sites and apps.
TiVo has been very active forming digital alliances: It forged another partnership with Viacom on Monday to help Viacom match its audiences against TiVo’s and factor in data on purchase habits and the like.
Cooke said he expects the companies will add more set-top box partners as it proceeds with its platform roll out.
“Theoretically this could scale … [to a scenario] where we see more publishers serve as an audience extension to a broadcaster’s inventory,” he added.
