At the start of 2020, video streaming giant Roku’s upfront deck predicted consumer time spent viewing streaming TV would surpass traditional linear over a period of five years. Instead they did so in a year, fueled in large part by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It is a fundamental shift in viewership,” said Alison Levin, Roku’s VP […]
TV measurement is hamstrung by household-level data. Despite the scale of set-top box and smart TV data, there’s no easy way to connect ad exposure on a television to a specific person within a household. “And if you don’t break TV data down to the person, it’s very difficult to do cross-media measurement or run […]
Smart TV manufacturer Vizio is reorganizing to bring more television data into its advertising and content business. Inscape, Vizio’s data and automatic content recognition (ACR) subsidiary, has been combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast, Vizio’s smart TV content platform. The three will now function as a single unit. Prior to the strategic reorg, announced on […]
Bringing online buying practices to OTT isn’t as simple as plugging in a buying platform and revving it up. If a display ad doesn’t load or an online video buffers on a browser, it’s annoying. If an ad on the big glass doesn’t show properly, it breaks the user experience. NBCU knows these quality control […]
Self-serve interfaces are old hat in the digital world. But they’re relatively new to TV buyers who struggle with the planning, buying and measurement of audience-based campaigns. Ampersand, the Comcast/Cox/Charter joint ad sales venture previously known as NCC Media, is trialing a self-serve version of the AND platform, its advanced TV planning interface that treats […]
The video ad server and SSP SpotX boosted its addressable TV capabilities Tuesday by upgrading its platform, which can now replace linear ads on smart TVs in real time. This function can be enabled by content owners working through Project OAR, an open standard led by TV manufacturer VIZIO and whose founding members include AMC […]
This ain’t no papercut. Roughly 6.6 million United States households will cut the cord this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast on pay TV trends, released Monday. That’s a 7.5% year-over-year decline, the biggest drop eMarketer has observed. And the picture doesn’t get much rosier for broadcast TV. By 2024, more than one-third of all […]
TV data science company EDO released an insights platform Thursday designed to help brands, agencies and broadcasters better plan linear TV campaigns and understand how effectively those campaigns drive search engagement. The platform, called Ad EnGage, contains a module that provides competitive intelligence – where advertisers can see where competitors placed their own TV ads […]
Peacock’s exclusive launch window for advertisers will end this fall, as it opens up a portion of its inventory to a wider group of brands starting in Q4. The NBCUniversal-owned streaming service launched on July 15 with 10 advertisers, including Target, Unilever and Verizon, who received category exclusivity and the ability to test new ad […]
AT&T is reportedly exploring a sale of Xandr, the ad tech unit it launched in 2018 with lofty ambitions to transform the TV advertising industry with data and automation. The talks are still preliminary and a deal may not go through, per The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news. Xandr made a big splash […]
The Trade Desk’s stock was up nearly 5% in after-hour’s trading on Thursday, despite posting a 13% year-over-over dip in revenue in the second quarter. To what does TTD owe this optimism? Two words: connected TV. “We believe that the COVID pandemic has permanently accelerated the growth of CTV,” CEO Jeff Green told investors on […]
Roku did way better than the TV ad market at large in Q2, despite a major pullback in ad spend from brands across the board. Platform revenues, which include advertising, grew 46% YoY to $244.8 million, Roku said Wednesday during its Q2 earnings call. Overall, revenues increased 42% YoY to $356 million in the quarter. […]
Brands are pumped about the connected TV opportunity. But without the ability to measure campaigns with the same level of granularity as they can on digital channels, “CTV is not quite as fun as we want it to be,” said Scott Symonds, a managing partner at WPP digital agency AKQA. “A high-attention platform like you […]
The impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on AT&T and WarnerMedia are far reaching, totaling $2.8 billion in the second quarter alone. Overall, AT&T revenue declined 9% YoY to $45 billion in Q2. CEO John Stankey expects the effects of the coronavirus to become the “business norm well into next year.” AT&T’s WarnerMedia division took the […]
Netflix will spend less on marketing this year in part due to COVID-19 – but the streaming platform was planning on moving in that direction anyway. “In terms of the march toward less traditional media, we’ve been on that for some time,” said Netflix chief content officer and newly appointed co-CEO Ted Sarandos on the company’s […]
As TV networks launch or acquire ad-supported streaming services (AVOD), they have a big opportunity to reinvent the broken ad experience for both viewers and media buyers. And while these networks have the opportunity to bring their AVOD learnings back to linear, the OTT networks can also learn a lesson or two from the linear […]
Amobee is making its suite of tools for TV and connected TV planning, targeting and measurement available on a self-serve basis starting Wednesday. The solution, called TV Amplifier, was first released as a managed service last year. Automation is needed in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, particularly with streaming consumption rising during the pandemic, said […]
Nielsen expects to lay off 3,500 people – roughly 8% of its global workforce – as part of a restructuring, the company said on Tuesday. Headcount was around 46,000 in 2019. The move – which Nielsen called “an optimization plan” – is more accurately described as a massive cost-cutting effort to support Nielsen’s upcoming split into two […]
Ad supported video on demand (AVOD) is growing, with more content – for instance, NBCUniversal’s Peacock launches this summer – as well as more viewers. Forty-five percent of people who regularly watch online video tune into ad-supported services, according to the IAB. Still, AVOD isn’t ubiquitous yet, so who can advertisers actually reach today? […]
Measurement is a major selling point for local TV advertisers as the economy starts to (sort of) reopen. Scale, however, has historically been a problem, and there hasn’t been enough data for broadcasters such as TEGNA to properly track user journeys to completion. On Wednesday, Alphonso, TEGNA’s long-time attribution and TV data partner, added TV […]
The House of the Mouse has one ad tech team now. Disney has merged all of its ad tech talent and products, including what came along with the Hulu acquisition, into a single, centralized team led by Jeremy Helfand, previously Hulu’s VP and head of advertising platforms. Tuesday was Helfand’s first day at the helm […]
Anyone who’s streamed content has firsthand experience of what happens when ad podding technology misfires. Ad podding is supposed to eliminate redundancy and conflict, but whereas linear has rules and controls in place to avoid duplication, enable competitive separation, minimize latency and manage frequency capping, CTV commercial breaks are rife with all four – plus blank […]
Popular YouTube channels for kids are migrating to the TV set through The Roku Channel and other ad-supported apps. Launched in 2017, The Roku Channel aggregates free content distributed on Roku’s platform along with live TV networks, premium video subscriptions and content packages geared toward different genres and age groups. When The Roku Channel launched […]
Television upfronts normally showcase sizzle reels of upcoming shows to guide buyers’ investments. But with programming in flux due to the coronavirus pandemic, Disney’s virtual upfronts turned the sizzle to its initiatives around linear addressability, attribution, programmatic and digital platform unification. “We had more time to talk about our investment in data and technology,” said […]
American adults streamed almost 142 billion hours of content during the week of May 11, up roughly 43% from a year ago, according to Nielsen. And The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green predicted during the company’s Q1 earnings call that reach on CTV will “rival and even surpass” linear TV in the near future. But […]
The Weather Channel and AMC Networks said Tuesday they have joined OpenAP, where national broadcasters can provide targetable audiences for advertisers. Both broadcasters will make their entire slate of national linear and OTT inventory available through OpenAP. Media buyers negotiate with the networks directly and activate through OpenAP, which normalizes audience definitions, day parts and […]
Canela Media, a digital media company for Latino youth in the United States, launched a free ad-supported OTT network on Tuesday called Canela TV. Canela enters the streaming market alongside major media companies, such as NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia, and as advertisers pull back spend in the wake of COVID-19. But the team had been working […]
YouTube is expanding the amount of inventory it’s availing in the upfront this year through a new offering called YouTube Select, the company said Tuesday. YouTube Select grows the pool of inventory advertisers can purchase on a guaranteed upfront basis by bringing more channels into Google Preferred. The new channels, called “emerging lineups,” are organized […]
Professional drone racing is a sport for our socially distanced world. Pilots race remotely wearing goggles that provide a first-person view from their drones as they whizz around 3D courses in neon lit arenas and outdoor tracks at nearly 100 miles per hour. But drone racing was gaining momentum with viewers and marketers before COVID-19 […]
NBCU said Monday it has added inventory from Sky to One Platform, its ad offering where brands can plan, buy, optimize and measure across all of the media company’s linear and digital inventory. Adding Sky’s inventory extends One Platform’s reach to half a million monthly viewers across 160 countries. Buyers can access Sky’s global IP […]
