Most marketers rely on household-level data to target audiences on connected TV. But homes are made up of multiple viewers with different preferences of what they like to watch and buy.
So ad-supported streaming platform Tubi has teamed up with TransUnion to understand more about the people watching Tubi within a given home, the companies said Wednesday.
Tubi has overlaid TransUnion’s data set, which includes online and offline behavioral and demographic data underpinned with anonymized PII, onto its own understanding of household viewership on the platform. The combined data set enables brands to target individuals more granularly within the home, while allowing Tubi to surface more relevant content through its recommendation engine depending on who is watching.
TransUnion’s marketing data set is sourced independently from the data within its credit reporting agency, but uses the company’s historical knowledge of data science, identity matching, validation and privacy compliance, said Matt Spiegel, EVP of digital marketing solutions at TransUnion.
“We want to turn an understanding that you are reaching that home into who is in the home that you’re reaching,” he said.
With TransUnion data, Tubi advertisers can better understand who they’re reaching from an age and gender perspective and target against more advanced audiences at the individual level. They can also better manage reach and frequency for individual viewers.
“[Before] we might not have had information like, is this is a co-viewing home? Are there children? What’s the household income?” said Tubi chief revenue officer Mark Rotblat. “These are targeting parameters advertisers care deeply about.”
Because Tubi is directly overlaying TransUnion’s data set in its ad server, buyers can execute against the data programmatically through their DSP of choice or through direct IOs. Buyers already activating on Tubi can access the combined data set immediately. Tubi is working on enabling deal-IDs for programmatic guaranteed buys.
“The data is not [onboarded] at the DSP level, and one of the benefits is higher match rates, Rotblat said. “When you onboard data into a DSP that then goes into multiple SSPs, scale gets impacted.”
By teaming up with Tubi directly, TransUnion is betting that unlike digital, the CTV ecosystem will not be an open marketplace. “We think it’s important that guys like Tubi are able to activate this type of data to deliver personalized experiences,” Spiegel said.
The partnership, which has been in the works for over a year, is not exclusive. TransUnion is working with other CTV providers on similar deals, but declined to share names.
“We certainly want to be a player in the industry at large and hope our work with Tubi will help us evolve toward that,” Spiegel said.
