LiveRamp And Comscore Help Create More Scale For Addressable TV Advertising

As I’ve been banging on about for the past few weeks, if there’s any sort of upside to the current situation, it’s that catastrophe tends to accelerate innovation.

In the TV industry that means the advanced advertising solutions—addressable advertising in particular— that seemingly everyone agrees are the future of the industry, are finally on the verge of taking wing and fulfilling their potential. 

Waiting On Addressable

In the years I’ve been at this, I’ve yet to meet anyone who thought addressable was a terrible idea. There are some who thought it should be limited to brands with certain requirements (e.g., reaching between 5% and 30% of a show’s total audience) and certain goals,  but there was general consensus that introducing more advanced digital-style targeting capabilities and the advanced analytics that came with them was mostly an excellent idea.

That said, there were always excuses—it was too hard to measure, too hard to plan against, the networks didn’t trust the MVPDs to serve it for them, there wasn’t enough scale, the agencies don’t understand it, set top data isn’t reliable…and so it largely remained on the slow burner because, let’s face it, until March, things were still going fairly well for the TV industry which meant there wasn’t any real impetus to change. 

Only now there is a greater impetus (and then some) to get serious about addressable advertising and make it more mainstream, which is why, coming on the heels of a number of other announcements around addressable, the deal between Comscore and LiveRamp is definitely another step in making that a reality.

Their goal is to combine Comscore’s measurement capabilities, LiveRamp’s data management capabilities and attribution capabilities together so as to make it easier for brands to run addressable advertising. 

The continued velocity of Project OAR and Nielsen’s addressable initiatives to make linear addressable on TVs, the deal between Ampersand and Verizon, and the velocity behind segment based buying via OpenAP, addressable is catching steam. 

When this news is considered against the backdrop of the recent deal between iSpot and Neustar which brings together cross platform TV ad measurement, digital attribution and identity management at scale, and the evolution of Oracle’s MOAT, the pieces are now coming into place to give the industry a measurement infrastructure able to help addressable take off.

The New Comscore-LiveRamp Deal

With that in mind, I recently sat down with key executives from both Comscore and LiveRamp to get some more insight into what they are planning.

The key to the deal is that it adds Comscore’s measurement capability—set-top box data licensed from MVPDs in 210 local markets plus it’s bread and butter 98% of web traffic service—with LiveRamp’s identity management solutions and Data+Math’s outcome solution.

On a practical level, it means that an advertiser that wants to run an addressable campaign now has even more options available for measurement, segment creation and understanding business outcomes. 

They can, for instance, take their first and second party data and put it into LiveRamp’s Safe Haven environment where it will be anonymized in a very privacy compliant way that gives the brand the ability to use LiveRamp’s identity linking and mapping capabilities to create custom audience segments without the data actually leaving LiveRamp’s Safe Haven.

Then, by using both Comscore’s digital and set top box data and the ACR data from Inscape’s 14 million + (VIZIO) smart TV universe, they can conceptually measure how many viewers in the target demo actually saw the ad on linear, on CTV and on digital. 

The final step is using Data+Math to try and connect that activity to business outcomes, AKA multitouch attribution—what did households do after seeing the ads, how many viewers visited the website, how many went to the offline store, how many made an actual purchase, etc.

The thrust of the partnership as I see it is to help addressable, cross-platform advertising achieve even greater scale, something that addressable—which is often a series of smaller bespoke solutions—is in need of. 

“Because we can measure all those things, that will allow addressable to become more mainstream, start getting more scale, because now there is less risk for the market,” noted Jay Prasad, Live Ramp’s Chief Strategy Officer. 

The deal will also help advance the cause of cross-platform measurement, something that is much in demand right now as many of the new entrants into the TV arena are DTC brands that started off running ads on digital platforms before pivoting to TV. 

 As the major TV companies flesh out their offerings to include a range of different platforms with different delivery methods—think ViacomCBS and Pluto or Comcast and Xumo—they will need a way to track viewing across all their various platforms.

As Prasad notes, “Whether it’s on demand on the set top box, whether it’s linear, or whether it’s streaming, there is a common denominator that’s required, and that is data.”

The more data that is available from multiple sources, the thinking is, the more comfortable brands will feel in making addressable a larger part of their ad spend. But linking it all together accurately from multiple platforms will be no easy task.

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