TV

This year, TV upfront spend will likely be softer, and buyers will be slower to make long-term commitments. Consider it a plateau.

Nielsen is reverting back to its panel-based C3 and C7 ratings that track average commercial time over three or seven days. The currency switch-up just weeks ahead of the upfronts has only added to the industry’s mounting frustrations with Nielsen.

Affinity Solutions has a new platform that lets advertisers create audiences with purchase and viewing data, and plan campaigns based on competitor ads.

The MRC reinstating its accreditation of Nielsen’s national ratings might improve the measurement giant’s standing in the TV currency race.

Nielsen has re-earned its accreditation from the Media Rating Council for national TV ratings. But will Nielsen be able to regain the industry’s trust before it’s too late?

Comcast-owned ad buying platform AudienceXpress upgraded its targeting chops, including more data for audience segmentation and new conquesting capabilities.

The corporate drama continues at LG Ads. Alphonso’s founders – including several who were unceremoniously booted from the company in December –  along with a group of minority shareholders are suing South Korean electronics manufacturer LG and Zenith, its US R&D subsidiary, over alleged board malfeasance. LG acquired TV data measurement provider Alphonso in January […]

Ampersand – a local TV sales consortium co-owned by cable companies Comcast, Charter and Cox – rolled out new audience segments for brands to target sports fans based on the type of sports they enjoy watching.

This year, NBCUniversal hosted its competitors on stage at One23, the broadcaster’s annual developer conference. Why? One word: measurement.

Netflix President of Advertising Jeremi Gorman was hired September 26. Less than two months later, on November 12, Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in 12 countries. For now, Basic with Ads is focused on the basics, including ad tech and measurement partnerships and the rudiments of brand safety. But Netflix is “ripping through all the […]

National broadcasters, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox and NBCU, are forming a joint industry committee to create a standard for multiple cross-platform video currencies in time for the 2024 upfronts. Notably absent from that initial list: Nielsen.

The leadership team is out at LG Ads Solutions. As of Friday, at least two of Alphonso’s top brass were pushed out, including CEO Raghu Kodige and Alphonso co-founder and executive chairman Ashish Chordia. What gives?

Smart TV manufacturer VIZIO announced a census-representative panel built using automatic content recognition data from Inscape, VIZIO’s ACR data subsidiary. VIZIO has access to ACR data from roughly 21 million smart TVs, and Innovid is one of the first measurement providers to use VIZIO’s so-called “National Representative Panel.”

Catalina Crunch started off in 2017 as a purely direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand advertising ketogenic (“keto”) snack products on search and social, including Facebook and Instagram. But, as product demand and Facebook CPMs concurrently rose, a DTC-only biz wasn’t enough to scale the business.

Most people have already heard of Pizza Hut. But high awareness isn’t enough to generate new and consistent sales. Which is why well-known brands like Pizza Hut are looking to new channels, including CTV, to drive incremental sales by reaching younger and, hopefully, incremental audiences who could eventually turn into repeat customers.

The future of TV is addressable, meaning one-to-one ad targeting to a device, across not just CTV but also linear inventory. Yet still, addressable TV remains a small piece of media buying, which the industry addressed at Paramount’s Addressable Now summit in New York City on Tuesday.

Video SSP Beachfront and Canoe Ventures expanded their ad-serving partnership across several more programmers. The two companies integrated their tech stacks in 2019 so broadcasters or streamers that work with Canoe can channel inventory more effectively to Beachfront’s programmatic pipes. Now, six more programmers, including Kabillion, Afro TV and TV One, are using the integrated solution.

VideoAmp released a tool that allows publishers and advertisers to compare audience viewership second by second throughout the duration of a program. The purpose is to help buyers target their ads more effectively. Advertisers have been demanding discrete program insights for targeting and measurement planning, Jonathan Bohm, VP of product at VideoAmp, tells AdExchanger.

Streaming has a Hispanic underrepresentation problem. Hispanic Americans account for nearly 20% of the US population, but Latino actors were cast in only 5.5% of the roles in digital programming during the 2019-2020 broadcast season. The representation gap is even wider in streaming TV than it is in broadcast, where Latino actors accounted for 6.3% of all roles.

At the Next TV Summit in New York City on Tuesday, legacy TV companies and the technology providers that serve them pushed back against an early eulogy for broadcast television. As old players reinvent themselves and new ones join the scene, TV distribution is coming full circle — broadcasters are focused on getting their network signals to stream on mobile devices and connected TV (CTV).

Live television is back in style. And according to Magnite, there’s a surge in demand for linear addressable inventory from programmatic buyers. The net result is that SSPs are squeezing linear addressability into their tech stacks. Magnite, for one, ran a test campaign that points to programmatic addressable’s incremental reach potential.

Advanced TV platform Cadent announced a partnership with data provider Tunnl with an eye on what’s known as issue advocacy segments, which are different from general political ad segments. Issue advocacy campaigns go beyond political affiliation and aim to reach people based on the “hot button” issues that voters are concerned with, such as climate change or reproductive rights.

TV ad tech and identity resolution company Blockgraph – jointly owned by Comcast, Charter and Paramount – announced a partnership with FullThrottle, which focuses on household-level data as opposed to user data like third-party cookies, to expand its pool of anonymized advertising IDs.

Ampersand released a self-service option for TV marketers to monitor incremental reach across multiple screens. The capability was already available as a managed service, but advertisers have been demanding more control and transparency over the buying process, said Andrew Matero, Ampersand’s VP of platform – and effective incremental reach calls for considering much more than just streaming.

If the NewFronts is where buyers flirt with newer media channels and streaming services, the upfronts, which wrapped up this week, is where things start to get serious, as legacy broadcasters showcase their new content in the hopes that advertisers will put a ring on it – but this year, pretty much all of the major programmers had streaming on the brain.

Pre-pandemic, Great Wolf Lodge devoted the majority of its media strategy to performance-based marketing and programmatic buying. But as the family resort rebuilds after the pandemic, it’s turning back to its upper-funnel roots with an omnichannel, brand-building campaign. Upper-funnel metrics are now front-and-center for the hospitality-focused brand.

Nielsen announced it’s selling itself to a private equity group for $16 billion. The future might be iffy for Nielsen, but it’s much more certain for the rest of the industry. Industry experts say a buyout of this size is a “boost of momentum” toward a multicurrency future that offers TV marketers the speed and transparency they’re looking for across platforms.

According to Canoe Ventures, ad efficiency comes down to one thing: scale. On Wednesday, the data and technology provider announced four major broadcasters that signed on to enable its national addressable TV solution.

Can you make a sale off an ad that no one’s seeing? Not without a side of telepathy. According to a paper published in the academic journal Marketing Science last week, 30% of TV ads play to empty rooms. While the TV industry’s trust in Nielsen as a measurement system is at a low right […]

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 […]