OpenAP is enabling attribution within its advanced TV marketplace via an iSpot partnership.
OpenAP is a consortium of TV networks – AMC Networks, Fox, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, The Weather Channel and Univision – that allow advertisers to buy standardized audiences across all of them. Now, buyers purchasing inventory in the OpenAP Market can do a single, standardized attribution study using iSpot.
Advertisers want to see the performance of bottom-funnel metrics across their spend, not just with an individual TV publisher. Those metrics include online conversions, retail visits, tuning in to a news program or box office sales.
OpenAP’s move into attribution is an expansion of its offering. Initially, the consortium worked to standardize audience definitions. Then it focused on execution, and building an optimized plan across different buy-side and sell-side systems. “Now we’re leaning more into attribution, and how to bring a holistic attribution solution to OpenAP,” CEO David Levy said.
The deal will most benefit brands and agencies that aren’t currently working with iSpot, Levy said. OpenAP hopes to expand even beyond this partnership and provide more attribution and cross-platform measurement offerings.
Specifically, OpenAP is also eyeing developing more solid reach measurement.
“A big focus for us this coming year will be looking at how to work with providers from a data and currency perspective to give brands a better sense of who they are reaching across platforms and to optimize reach across platforms,” Levy said.
OpenAP wants to provide a more accurate portrait of the reach a marketer actually gets. Levy believes many vendors overstate their ability to measure “incremental” or “unduplicated reach.”
“Getting incremental reach in digital from linear – most of that is BS,” Levy said. “In order to make that a reality, you’re going to need much more deterministic data at a larger scale, bring that into DAI [dynamic ad insertion] environments, in a more privacy-compliant way.”
OpenAP’s membership grew steadily over the past year. In December, CBS joined OpenAP, followed by AMC Networks, followed by The Weather Channel in June. “Hundreds of millions of dollars” are going through OpenAP just in the past year, Levy said. They’re usually a portion of the same dollars that are part of TV upfront discussions.
