Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
In TV Ad Land, the road to streaming media convergence is still a long way off.
TV content can be packaged into streaming services, but from an advertiser’s perspective, the data is still not part of one simple package. Linear and linked TV advertising still relies on different data sourceswhich makes campaign planning a mess.
To help offset some of these issues, Ampersand, the TV sales consortium co-owned by Comcast, Charter and Cox, launched a new measurement platform this week. The platform combines streaming and traditional TV data to give buyers a better idea of the incremental reach and frequency of their campaigns.
While the platform should help national advertisers, it’s especially useful for local and multi-market advertisers who are still trying to balance their investments in streaming and traditional TV, said Justin Rosen, Ampersand’s vice president of data and analytics.
The difference between streaming and linear advertising data strongly affects small and medium-sized businesses, Rosen said, because most broadcasters provide ad products to national brands. But he noted that small and local businesses would spend more on TV if streaming ad vendors offered them enough data they need to determine whether TV is a good investment, Rosen said.
Ampersand data stream
Ampersand’s new measurement tool combines TV viewing and subscriber data such as age, gender, address and consumption patterns from Comcast, Charter and Cox. Rosen said Ampersand also intends to include data from two other telco partners, Altice and Verizon, though he was unable to share a timeline. Ampersand makes this data available to buyers as an anonymized ID.
Up until this point, traditional and streaming TV data on the Ampersand platform has been “a little bit more siloed,” Rosen said, because they’re processed differently. Linear TV viewing data comes from set-top boxes and is typically at the household level, while streaming data comes from connected devices such as smart TVs and game consoles.
For buyers, data fragmentation reduces compliance and adds real time to campaign planning. Regional advertisers have a particular problem with data silos, Rosen said, because they target smaller cohorts of people, often with one or a few zip codes. If the data in a smaller ad campaign is inconsistent, inaccurate, or inaccessible, the risk of duplication increases and frequency management becomes even more challenging. The same users are being served the ad over and over and advertisers are not achieving their true reach goals.
But now “streaming [and traditional] they are together [in our] source of TV insights,” Rosen said, which should make campaign planning “more streamlined and cohesive” for media buyers and brands.
Going forward, Rosen said, Ampersand buyers will get a faster and clearer forecast of campaign reach and frequency based on a designated market area. This can be especially useful for brands looking for a more “tactical environment” to pursue incremental reach. If an advertiser finds that certain apps or networks reach a larger portion of their target audience linearly versus streaming or vice versa, they can allocate accordingly.
Ultimately, he says, cleaner and faster measurement should encourage more marketers to make TV a bigger part of their advertising budgets.