By John Bugailiskis
LAS VEGAS – Connected TV (CTV, or TVs used to stream video over the Internet) viewing continues to soar during the pandemic, but while the shift from broadcast to CTV accelerates, ad spends are lagging in part because measurement tools have yet to catch up to TV.
That could soon change with new solutions announced this week at CES 2022 from Nielsen and Resonate to better capture the value of CTV viewers.
Resonate boasts its CTV Insights solution will provide clients with an “unprecedented level of insights into their connected TV audiences.” With its measuring solution Resonate claims media and publishing companies can uncover and understand key characteristics and motivations of connected TV viewership, turning “anonymous viewers into compelling audience segments ready to be fully monetized.”
“With CTV viewership skyrocketing, there are significant gaps in understanding these audiences. The immense potential to optimize the advertising revenue associated with these viewers, demands better tools,” says Bryan Gernert, CEO of Resonate in a statement.
“To deliver on the advanced targeting capabilities of CTV, media and entertainment organizations need access to comprehensive, continuously updated research about these viewers: who they are, what they care about, including their product preferences, shopping behaviors, and brand affinities, but also, why they make the decisions to choose, buy, support or abandon a product or brand. This is how today’s leading media companies sell their advertising, with the data provided through the Resonate CTV Insights product and the Resonate Ignite platform.”
CTV Insights utilizes an enhanced, cookieless understanding of CTV audiences by connecting that audience to the continuously updated Resonate Elements data set, which includes psychographics, behavioural, preferences, intent and more.
These insights are intended to help companies optimize ad sales and grow ad revenue. Clients have the option of segmenting their viewers by device, show or another method, and then onboard to the Resonate Ignite platform for analysis and insights, explains Resonate.
Specific features allow clients to:
- Access a robust, privacy safe data set connected to CTV viewers who watch a specific show or use a specific device
- Analyze their audiences against 14,000 insights and 230 million connected profiles
- Better monetize audiences by proving their unique value to advertising partners
- Benefit from Resonate leveraging its own proprietary, AI-powered ID Graph for accurate matching and quality assurance as precision and transparency are paramount with CTV
Competing with CTV Insights is Nielsen’s new Streaming Signals. Nielsen calls it a “first-of-its-kind solution” that unbundles household viewing. Nielsen notes that most advertising on CTV occurs at the household level, but that households are often made up of diverse audiences with different interests. Streaming Signals is optimized for Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) clients since the two solutions together enable clients to both optimize and measure CTV reach for more efficient advertising, claims Nielsen.
The new solution utilizes custom machine learning algorithms to determine who is in the household based on historical viewership data. It delivers a signal within 50 milliseconds to CTV operators indicating who is currently streaming program content.
This enables advertisers and agencies to make better, faster choices to reach their target audiences, and eliminates the delivery of irrelevant advertising to viewers, claims Nielsen. In turn, media owners can attract more media dollars with ad inventory that is “more accurately packaged, by delivering real-time advertising to the right audience.”
For example, if Sons of Anarchy is being watched within a household, the 35-year-old male likely watching the show will be shown an auto ad instead of a yogurt ad, giving CTV operators the ability to sharpen ad delivery from their inventory.
“Nielsen Streaming Signals brings a layer of unmatched real-time, person-level demographic precision to audience optimisation,” says Ameneh Atai, Nielsen’s general manager of digital and advanced TV, in a statement.
“We know that the media industry is going through accelerated change, switching to a streaming-first approach, and with an audience watching programming whenever, wherever, and on a number of devices. Nielsen is the only one that is unbundling the household because we are the only ones that sit at the intersection of the streaming behaviour and audience data.”
Late last year Nielsen also announced Disney and Magna have joined several agencies, advertisers and publishers as Nielsen One Alpha participants from both the buy and sell sides of the industry.
One Alpha will be specific to ad campaigns says Nielsen, which claims it is the first cross-platform measurement system of its kind that offers both comparability and audience deduplication across all screens (linear TV, connected TV, computer and mobile). The deduplicated ad measurement metrics account for age and gender information.
“There’s a critical need for the evolution of measurement to truly reflect audiences and engagement, and Disney is uniquely positioned to help define and develop that roadmap,” says Julie DeTraglia, head of research, insights and analytics for Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution, in a statement.
“We are pleased to join the Nielsen One Alpha program to ensure it accurately creates a holistic view of ad performance and content viewership for the industry.”
