ATV Ignite TV Data and Planning Partner is Comscore; Digital Data Partners Include LiveRamp, Neustar, and NinthDecimal; Advanced TV Inventory Partner Include WideOrbit and clypd
Santa Monica, CA – January 5, 2017 - VideoAmp, The Total Video platform for the TV and video ecosystem, today unveiled its newest product - Advanced Television (ATV) Ignite. ATV Ignite is a self-service, SaaS platform for TV and digital agencies that optimizes existing TV plans (including upfront commitments) as well as scatter/programmatic planning that combines traditional TV targeting with first and third party digital data. For an increasingly fragmented market in terms of viewership and content distribution, this is as a critical step for TV and digital video planning and buying to become more unified and to have an effective “currency” framework. The platform also includes optimization against traditional GRP currencies, while applying digital or secondary targeting for TV buys. ATV Ignite’s capabilities and wide ranging partnerships represent one of the industry’s most ambitious efforts to unify TV and video for marketers and their agencies.
The new ATV Ignite advertising platform will be on full display at the VideoAmp booth number CS10 in C Space in ARIA at CES Tech South at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show.
VideoAmp’s ATV Ignite empowers advertisers to look at upfront TV plans against TV currencies, and digital, and first party audiences segments, matching audiences across devices and measuring channel/programmer audience concentration, thus creating the industry’s first and true cross-screen TV and video planning platform. VideoAmp’s ATV Ignite launch partners include, Comscore, Neustar, LiveRamp, and NinthDecimal.
TV viewership data, programmatic TV, the rise of OTT, and marketers investing in their own marketing clouds have been largely happening on parallel paths,” said Jay Prasad, Chief Business Officer, VideoAmp. “Hence, it is this media strategy approach of index based buying that will be growing in importance. The notion of targeting age and gender on remnant TV inventory using software is not providing the value marketers are looking for, and is thus limiting innovation in the space. We feel the real opportunity is to optimize upfront TV alongside scatter and video from all screens simultaneously that create advanced currencies that give strong performance measurement.”
ATV Ignite joins the already in market VideoAmp cross screen DSP and proprietary user graph, thus uniting traditional TV planning with digital data and support for traditional and advanced measurement currencies. TV planning and buying can now be done in a similar fashion to digital, giving new tools and flexibility to marketers.
Digital Data & TV Viewership Indexing:VideoAmp & Comscore
The goal of bridging TV viewership to the digital world has been quite difficult as the data sets come from different places and aren’t suited to audience targeting for video advertising campaigns across different screens, along with the ability for audience buying by segments. VideoAmp was able to integrate its proprietary user graph with Comscore’s TV Essentials clustered TV viewership file to create the foundation for this indexing product. With ATV Ignite, it’s now possible to get an index of concentrated TV viewership at the channel- and daypart-level across all 212 U.S. DMAs, against a digital audience segment.
“VideoAmp created a product that has a level of accuracy and scale not yet achieved in the market,” said Ross McCray, Co-Founder & CEO, VideoAmp. “Whereas there are panel based approaches for approximating TV viewership audiences in digital, or the use of syndicated TV viewership segments in digital have been available, there has not been a combination of a data platform that combines the national scale of the entire Comscore set-top box footprint with a user graph that covers more than 170M individuals with a self-serve UI, this does change how the market will operate moving forward.”
“We are working with VideoAmp across several use cases, which are hitting a market need that we have seen across our customer base. The power of Comscore TV data will be available to plan and execute automated buys in TV and beyond,” said Chris Wilson, EVP National Television, Comscore. “Furthermore, the rapid acceleration of advanced consumer targeting data being used in TV buying needs to be measured by a cross-platform currency that has scale, and our work with VideoAmp covers that.”
Custom Data Use Cases - Targeting TV in New Ways: LiveRamp, Neustar, and NinthDecimal
Much of the excitement around programmatic TV or advanced TV advertising centers around the ability to go far beyond age and gender, or basic demographic information such as presence of children or household income. That has been difficult until now, as most targeting options were standardized or based on panel based rankers.
ATV Ignite will now allow for an advertisers first party data to be activated via partners like LiveRamp and Neustar to be used in TV planning and buying. Thus, an advertiser can create a specific TV plan for existing customers and focus the creative around retention or suppress an existing customer base and focus on customer acquisition.
“We are excited to partner with VideoAmp to power the next generation of advanced television solutions geared at optimizing the success of ATV marketing campaigns. Our partnership now brings the most powerful connection between digital and Advanced TV to help marketers combine their data and insights together. We are thrilled to support the launch of ATV Ignite platform for data activation of 1st party data and access to 3rd party data targeting including our own AdAdvisor Audiences,” said Michael Schoen, VP of Marketing Services, Neustar. “Through this partnership, omni-channel measurement as well as audience and viewership analytics come to life helping inform on-going ATV optimization through Neustar’s OneID system. This allows marketers access to verified identity, corroborated against authoritative sources of consumer data to improve accuracy and scale of their offline and digital data linkages across all types of Advanced TV marketing efforts. ”
Advertising agencies and markets who use ATV Ignite will be able to select first party audience segments, or from a pool of segments from the partners listed above, and in just a few minutes get an actual TV plan that has all the important elements forecasted in real time, that includes index concentration against that digital segment across local broadcast, national cable, or when possible more addressable inventory.
“Through this partnership, clients now have the capability to engage TV audiences at a people-based level that was previously not possible. Using LiveRamp IdentityLink and ATV Ignite, marketers can leverage first-party CRM data and third-party data, resolve that data to the individual level, and utilize it to provide more personalized and compelling TV experiences,” said Travis May, President, LiveRamp.
An example could be that a regional auto advertiser could select a NinthDecimal segment that has an audience of people who have been to an auto dealership in specific DMA’s over the last 90 days, and now see what TV shows, channels, and dayparts they should buy in local broadcast to best reach that precise audience.
ATV Ignite will also calculate these plans against GRPs as a benchmark, thus an advertiser could how their custom audience leveraging digital data compares to a traditional measurement.
TV Planning and Optimization: A New Planning Workflow driven by data
Even with all the rapid advancement to new delivery methods such as OTT and skinny bundles, the largest portion of any advertising budget is upfront TV. This being the largest and most critical component of a brand campaign is now able to be optimized with more precision across TV formats. ATV Ignite will allow agency clients to upload an existing TV plan from traditional workflow and planning systems. They will then be able to select first party or trusted third party segments and optimize a schedule, while forecasting against GRPs, eCPMs, or even digital conversion data.
“We’re glad to see VideoAmp focused on developing both the tools and the technical integrations needed to enable at-scale audience-based TV planning and buying,” said Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group. “We’re encouraged to see progress in developing both the tools and the technical integrations needed to enable at-scale audience-based TV planning and buying,”
This represents an innovation leap in how agencies can manage large budgets on behalf of complex advertising clients while still preserving the important element of securing access and price efficiencies via upfront negotiations. Most upfront deals today contain linear TV, VOD, and digital inventory as a part of fluidity budgets, ATV Ignite offers a more uniform way to allocate these budgets.
Activating and Automating Across TV Advertising Formats
When an advertiser would like to create, a data driven plan leveraging ATV Ignite, it’s critical that there is scale of quality inventory that is able to be matched up against the data, and that certain buying processes are automated. To that extent, the initial partnerships are with clypd and WideOrbit.
Through its integrations with clypd's platform, ATV Ignite will be able to access clypd's toolset for audience-driven TV advertising, automating directly negotiated television deals with leading national broadcasters and networks.
"As the de-facto platform for advanced audience ad sales within TV media companies, clypd appreciates the need to connect marketing investments with premium television media inventory," said Doug Hurd, Co-Founder and EVP of Business Development at clypd. "By integrating with clypd, VideoAmp's clients are now able to leverage the ATV feature set against linear TV, fulfilling the promise to bring data-driven advertising across all screens. "
“Targeting audiences with cross-screen video campaigns by indexing on location-based and first-party data is a game-changer for stretching consumer messaging across digital and TV while minimizing waste,” said Ian Ferreira, EVP Programmatic at WideOrbit. “ATV Ignite will help marketers plan TV placements more accurately by allowing them to use both new data sources and the battle-tested data from their data management platforms.”
According to a report by the analyst firm 451 Research, when it comes to video media-buying platforms with scale, VideoAmp was recognized for its “ability to define audiences via content analysis driven by deep learning.”
Contact:Kate DreyerComscore, Inc. +1 (571) 306-6447press@comscore.com