Fox, ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, E.W. Scripps and AMC Networks will begin their tests of Project OAR, on June 24, while Disney Media Networks, Discovery Networks, Hearst and WarnerMedia will start their trials in mid-August, Adweek reports.

Run by VIZIO’s Inscape, which uses data from VIZIO TVs gathered by automatic content recognition (ACR), it is the latest consortium following OpenAP and Nielsen’s test of an addressable TV ad-swapping technology.

Piece-by-piece

In case you missed it, we have a new special report out! Download it today to peruse this weekend and see insights from us + @vizioads around viewership trends this spring, including the return of select live sports and CTV growth. #GlassLevelData https://t.co/qUyE2Vxh5Z

— Inscape (@inscapetv) June 19, 2020

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Zeev Neumeier, Inscape’s President, stakes out Inscape’s credentials for openness and integration.

He says Project OAR eschews the approach of building an end-to-end tech stack for managing all connected TV ad services.

“The television industry, this doesn’t work like that,” Neumeier says. “It’s unreasonable to expect the $70 billion industry to just give you their inventory and say, ‘Have fun with that’.

“It would really have to be in an open standard and it would have to be in component-by-component where you allow players to pick the components that they want to use.”

How it works

Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs. The Open Addressable Ready consortium was announced in March 2019.

Earlier this year, the group announced it had begun technical integrations with major ad delivery and enablement engines FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager, Xandr and INVIDI.

When it comes to other networks that @HISTORY viewers are most likely to watch, @ScienceChannel leads, followed by @ahc_tv, @FYI, @Discovery and @MotorTrendTV. Get more #GlassLevelData here: https://t.co/QGf9BkprIt pic.twitter.com/P6cdPnZB6b

— Inscape (@inscapetv) June 15, 2020

Through the Open Addressable Ready standard, media sellers watermark the inventory that they want to make addressable. If a buyer wants to swap out a static ad with an addressable ad, VIZIO smart TVs read the watermark and send that information to the seller’s ad server, which swaps in the addressable ad in real-time.

It comes as Nielsen continues a beta test of its addressable ad placement technology.

In November, eMarketer estimated that connected ad spending in the US would reach $6.94 billion in 2019, and by 2021 it will total $10.81 billion., with 59.4% of that being traded programmatically.

The importance of being open

Neumeier says Inscape is still working out its own business model.

“This isn’t free,” he says. “We are going to charge for this. But if we charge for it by selling more data, or if we charge for it by selling impressions, or if we give people freedom to pay a little bit by impressions and a little bit by data, or vice-versa… that remains to be seen.”

One thing seems for sure. Whilst VIZIO’s Inscape has kick-started the consortium, Neumeier is pitching it as just one member.

“Project OAR is an open standard,” he says. “We are the official cheerleaders of Project OAR, we don’t own the thing. We’re the cheerleaders.

“This thing is created from the ground up to make it easy for other OEMs to say, ‘Look, you can implement it yourself’. You don’t need to call me.”

Now, after many early attempts, finally addressable TV is reaching scale.

But just how advanced is the infrastructure behind “advanced TV”?

In a Beet Retreat panel, Addressable Tech: Next-Gen Solutions: Fixing the Plumbing, three industry executives were asked that question.

• Chris Curley, Partner Lead, Google
• Adam Lowy, Chief Commercial Officer, Telaria
• Jodie McAfee, SVP, Inscape & Project OAR

All agreed that addressable TV capability and viewer scale has grown leaps and bounds since the earliest attempts a decade ago. But the panel also raised concerns that the infrastructure is not nearly as mature as it should be.

Ad delivery takes too long

Telaria’s Adam Lowy said lining up ads to support personalized play-out is not as frictionless as believed.

“In television, you have to send the (ad) spot to the box over the bird, has to sit in the box,” he said. “It takes about three or four days, maybe a week, to acquire (the ad), and then you go ahead and serve it.

“You can call that ‘mature’, I call that ‘we’ve got to move on from that at some point’.”

Addressable needs simplification

Telaria’s Adam Lowy said, right now, selling addressable ads to buyers is too complex.

“When you’re out there selling addressable (ads), it gets into the weeds so fast (that) you’ve essentially lost the sell, you’ve lost the mojo,” he said. “Because you get so into how it works and all the tech about it.

“I think we have to simplify the process and really state what addressable (advertising) is when you’re out there. And I think that is one of the things we need to fix.”

Long way to go

Google’s Chris Curley explained that, relative to digital media, addressable TV still needs to focus on open ecosystems.

“If you want to continue down a path where ads become more meaningful to the user and you can protect the privacy of the user and their wishes, as well as create meaningful measurement across all of these screens so that all of this works well at scale, we have a very long way to go,” he said.

“We need to focus on interoperability. We need to make sure that we’re working together and we’re using open standards in a way that works for everyone.”

Project OAR paddles ahead of Canoe

Project OAR is beginning to issue over-the-top firmware updates to 10 million connected TV sets, to better deliver ads from FreeWheel, Google and Xandr, said the outfit’s Jodie McAfee.

OAR is a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising,

“We’ve also hit our milestones, one of which was to have a live demo at CES, which we did.We actually ran six different demos with members, two of which were live feeds broadcast into the Vizio space at CES.

“We (also) distributed the measurement spec. We will start pushing the solution to Vizio TVs in a firmware update next week. We’re on track to have 10 million TVs live by the upfront.” The discussion took place on February 5.

The panel was led by Beet.TV editorial and strategy director Jon Watts.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.  For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

The process is part of Project OAR, a consortium kicked off by Vizio’s own ad-targeting division Inscape to achieve better scale in the sale of connected TV advertising.

Its Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs. The Open Addressable Ready consortium was announced in March.

At CES in January, the group announced it had begun technical integrations with major ad delivery and enablement engines FreeWheel, Google Ad Manager, Xandr and INVIDI.

In this new video interview with Beet.TV, Inscape’s Jodie McAfee says: “That will start next week roughly, so mid-February. That will be sort of a continuous roll because you don’t push firmware to the entire footprint of TVs at the same time because that means you might blow things up.

“So that rollout will happen over the course of mid-February through April with a target of having roughly 10 million TVs by the upfront (TV ad sales season).”

Inscape uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching.

At CES, Project OAR showed demos of “creative versioning” – its ability to swap out ads being played out in live broadcast TV feeds.

“That was a big deal,” McAfee recalls. “I think it caused everybody to go, okay this is for real.”

He says it led to ad agencies getting in touch with interest from their brand clients. In addition, OAR’s range of broadcast partners will also bring their existing brand advertisers to a beta test.

McAfee was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page. 

With the addition of Inscape data, 605 can measure more than 20 million households—slightly less than 20% of the TV viewing universe—in a further move away from panel-based research methodology.

“We think that it’s really important for the industry to move to more census-based measurement,” Tatta says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Among the things that Inscape, which is owned by VIZIO, brings to the table for 605 is helping to fill voids across set-top box and over-the-air and OTT metrics. By combining set-top data with Inscape’s automatic content recognition data “we’re able to get better cross-screen measurement on services beyond just pay TV.”

In addition to expanding its national reach, 605 gains faster data processing for its programmer and provider clients. “We basically get data in near real-time” with a delay of “an hour or two” versus “one to three days in general” for set-top box data.

605, started by Dolan Family Ventures, also gets viewing data from Charter Communications cable subscribers, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

Asked about audience duplication from the company’s data sources, Tatta says the duplication “is really essential because what’s interesting about the set-top box data is you’re actually capturing all viewing within the household, or at least what’s running through pay TV.

“Only until you have a full view of viewing in the household can you really get a sense in terms of where the viewing trends are,” for example share of consumption between pay-TV and OTT. “Or even just from one room to the next. Even though TV is bought at the household level kind of rolled up, being able to have a line of sight of viewership across all devices in the household is really important.”

Tatta adds that while advertiser focus on bottom-funnel or sales attribution is “incredibly important,” the industry should not neglect the “enormous contribution” TV makes to upper-funnel metrics, “whether it’s brand awareness, brand favorability and brand preference. Having a more holistic view of lift across the full funnel we think is really essential.”

At the recent FreeWheel NOWFRONT event in Manhattan, Steuer, who is Chief Research Officer, welcomed the “consistent effort across almost all of the networks and network groups to try to make advanced TV solutions work,” he explains in this Beet.TV interview.

This is in contrast to just a few years ago, when individual TV networks began to roll out their own advanced-targeting arrangements.

“Then we had OpenAP, which does not appear to be a force in the marketplace for this year’s UpFront,” Steuer says. “But every conversation we’re having with network groups involves some notion of trying to move or investment toward more advanced TV and other kinds of targeting and measurement, and we think that’s great.”

Omnicom has been using data from Vizio-owned Inscape “pretty deeply” for the past nine months and is currently working with VideoAmp to conjoin set-top box and ACR data. “I was pleased to see this morning that FreeWheel announced they’re doing the same thing with Comcast and Vizio Inscape ACR data.”

This is because set-top box and ACR data do different things very well, according to Steuer.

“ACR lets us get some read of both content and commercial exposure across sources so we can see both OTT and linear delivery in that data set. Set-top box data gets you every TV in the household, typically when people are pay-TV subscribers, but only gets you pay-TV subscribers.”

What still needs to happen is for MVPD’s and ACR providers to make their data available in a more “democratized” fashion. “But at least now we see steps in that direction, which is great,” Steuer adds.

Asked about a unified data platform that would serve much if not all of the TV industry, Steuer cites a “trust problem” with having any single vendor be the data aggregator.

“So what I think is going to have to happen is each of the data aggregators to find a way to make their data available in a linkable but segregated format.”

The end goal is the formation of a common set of data formats, pre-processing rules and linkage mechanisms.

“That’s the only way to evolve the TV business to compete in the world of walled gardens,” Steuer says.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined. For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.

FreeWheel is teaming with Data Plus Math and other attribution solutions providers to deliver faster insights into campaign performance. “A lot of times, you get information about how your campaign’s doing, especially around attribution and it’s far too often six months or even longer after a campaign’s over. It doesn’t allow you to optimize a campaign or in any way shape or form improve the performance during the flight,” says Wallach, who is SVP/CRO, FreeWheel Media.

To further enlarge its audience viewing data beyond Comcast’s huge footprint, FreeWheel is adding Inscape’s data set for “even more robust reporting capability,” particularly in the streaming video space. Data from more than 10 million opt-in Vizio smart TVs will be available to better target specific demographic and audience segments in TV ad deals, as Advertising Age reports.

“Since Vizio does go outside of the Comcast footprint, we can now start to model incremental reach and other access to consumers outside of our footprint,” Wallach adds.

FreeWheel will work with Adobe to help overcome the complexities of programmatic transactions in premium video. Given that most demand-side platforms were built to handle display ads, “Now you bring them into the living room and it creates a different type of environment. We’re working closely with the DSPs to solve for this and we’re leveraging our Drive platform to be able to promote audiences to them through Deal IDs so they can transact programmatically,” Wallach says.

“The reality is most DSPs try to use data from their side. They have different data arrangements and then they try to find the audiences in that live movement when the bidder is working.”

FreeWheel will “package up that inventory on a pre-bid basis, based on our insight and our data set having access to the ad server and the information that’s coming from there,” thereby leveraging the capabilities of DSPs “to bid appropriately on that supply.”

The latest partnerships enhance FreeWheel’s ability to talk to customers holistically about video in all its forms, according to Wallach.

For buyers of linear TV who also need to find audiences on OTT and CTV, “we’re able to help guide them and put together the right solutions for them.” For digital pure-play buyers looking for more reach beyond FreeWheel’s digital supply, “we can start to package in TV if they’re looking for audiences and impressions in that environment as well.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of The FreeWheel NOWFRONT: Media Reimagined.  For more coverage from the series, please visit this page.   

A consensus also emerged during the session that ultimately, one or more companies will figure out how to compensate consumers for their data beyond simply dispensing coupons and swag, perhaps one of the major credit card providers.

The panel was moderated by consultant Howard Shimmel, most recently of Turner Broadcasting, who at the outset mentioned the Starwood data breach because it was in the headlines that very morning. He asked whether despite the availability of great content and technology, “immense demand and an appetite to scale,” there will be enough data available given new legislation like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California.

Jodie McAfee of Inscape, a subsidiary of smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO, related the “classic case of no good deed goes unpunished” that occurred in 2015. VIZIO had just pushed to TV owners notification of how it collects household viewing data and where the data ends up. One of those owners was a reporter for Pro Publica who wrote a mostly “inaccurate” story about how TV’s can spy on them, according to McAfee.

“Two class action lawyers saw the article, found two plaintiffs and sued us and the rest was a complete mess,” said McAfee.

Among the more interesting learnings from the whole episode, the Federal Trade Commission thought that the language explaining what VIZIO does with owners’ viewing data was too buried. It should be “separate and prominent” from the TV setup process, which is what VIZIO ended up doing.

“Unless and until the consumer clicks ‘I accept,’ data collection is default off on our TV’s, so it is a full, true opt-in regime,” said McAfee.

Another relevant learning was the FTC’s view of the so-called value exchange that most advertising and media companies believe underpins the collection of consumer data. The government said “everybody needs to stop promising this idea that when the consumer opts in they’re going to get these bells and whistles around greater search and recommendation or whatever. Just knock it off. That’s not necessary and it’s kind of bullshit. Just tell them what you’re doing,” McAfee said.

The architects of GDPR hold the same view, according to McAfee. “It’s in GDPR. Don’t promise anything special. Just be clear about what you’re doing. That’s all anybody cares about.”

With an opt-in rate of 90% in the United States, “What we’ve learned is if you’re front and center with it and you are completely transparent about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, pretty much everybody, at least in the United States, they’ll opt in and they’re fine with it,” McAfee added.

Robert Bareuther of analytics and measurement firm iSpot.tv said the company gets “a tremendous amount of raw data from our valued partner VIZIO and we take that raw data and we decipher it into how households view content” and then measure business outcomes for advertisers. “We never see any private data, but it’s very important to us that rules are followed and you don’t breach anything. I think VIZIO’s done a spectacular job of making sure that everything’s on the up and up,” said Bareuther.

Nielsen Catalina’s Matt O’Grady said his company doesn’t touch any personally identifiable information about consumers, “but our applications for measurement and targeting are highly dependent upon PII. I’m dependent upon everybody in the ecosystem not violation or for lack of a better expression not screwing up.”

As for the impact of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica misadventure, “that made our liability statements and our onboarding much more difficult than it had ever been before,” said O’Grady.

Asked by Shimmel whether CPPA in California will end up looking like GDPR, O’Grady said the initiative is “a very healthy democracy in the sense that the pendulum can swing and people can really get a chance to voice their concerns. But I think a good substantial part of that opt-in is going to be re-written” before the law takes effect in January of 2020.

So will marketers ever end up having to actually pay consumers directly for their data, along with letting them control their data? “If I was involved in that, I don’t want a coupon,” said O’Grady. “I want true compensation for that. Somebody’s going to come along and figure out how to crack this nut. I don’t know if it’s going to be five years or twenty years from now, but I really do believe that we’re heading in that direction and there’s an enormous opportunity for somebody to come up with the vault concept.”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

Along with Vizio and its data unit Inscape, the consortium’s members are AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, FreeWheel, Hearst Television, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co. and Xandr, as Reuters reports.

In announcing the consortium, Vizio said that TV manufacturers use different technology and standards to enable addressable advertising. “It creates a level of complication for (TV networks), and scale is critical,” Reuters quotes Inscape SVP Jodie McAfee as saying.

While Vizio will create the new technology, it will be an open “industry standard” that competing TV makers can integrate into their products.

Last December, Beet.TV interviewed McAfee at Beet Retreat 2018 about Inscape’s experience in dealing with the Federal Trade Commission on issues involving consumer privacy and viewing data collection. In light of the news regarding Project OAR, Beet.TV is republishing that interview.

Being a pioneer has always carried risks and rewards. Smart-TV manufacturer VIZIO’s Inscape data unit found this out when the Federal Trade Commission a couple of years ago first started looking into what happens to viewer data collected with automatic content recognition, says Inscape SVP of Sales & Marketing Jodie McAfee.

Interacting with the FTC “was a little bit of a bad news, good news situation for us,” McAfee says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat 2018, where one panel discussion was devoted to data and privacy.

“The bad news was we were the first smart TV manufacturer to actually have such a discussion with the FTC. The FTC had never really taken a look at smart TV data collection and privacy regimes around it.”

The good news was “the fact that it put us in a position to actually sit down with the FTC and say, ‘okay, what do you want to see? What do you think a privacy regime should look like on a smart TV? So it became more of a collaboration as opposed to the FTC simply throwing down some ground rules and walking away.”

Nonetheless, the FTC fined Inscape for inappropriately collecting viewing data from 11 million TV sets.

“That back and forth generated really almost what our industry views as the VIZIO standard for smart TV data collection,” McAfee says. “And it also prepared us in advance for a little bit of what’s going on with GDPR because there were certain things around what the notification needs to look like, how it needs to read, that are now part of GDPR that we had already done coming out of that FTC negotiation.”

The FTC believed that many people are so intent on getting through the initial setup of a smart TV, they just scrolled through the terms of service so they could start watching something quickly, according to McAfee. “So they said what we’d like to see is a data collection notification that is separate and prominent from the rest of the terms of service.”

Thus was born VIZIO’s “completely separate screen” during the setup process titled “TV viewing data. And it walks through here’s how we do it, here’s what we’re doing, here’s who we give it to and here’s what they do with it.” People can either agree or decline, meaning data collection is off by default.

“So it is a true opt-in regime. We pushed that new regime to our entire footprint of TV’s in February of 2017 so we’ve been fully FTC compliant ever since,” says McAfee.

Changing its policy and communicating the new one to existing owners via a firmware update cost the company 2 million TV’s from its overall footprint because older ones “didn’t have enough processing power to actually support the user journey when we decided to make the opt out process easier.”

Have all other TV manufacturers taken note and now follow the FTC mandate? Not from what Inscape sees when the company checks them out, according to McAfee, most likely because they’re not in the data business like Inscape.

“The process for pushing a firmware update to a TV, it’s a pretty meaningful exercise. So I’m sure other manufacturers just did the math. Is it worth it or not. And I think some of them went, ‘not really.’”

This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.

In the practice of automated content recognition (ACR), a television set analyzes a viewers’ current viewing behavior to turn habits like viewing time and channel in to actionable data.

That is something ad-tech vendor Inscape can do better than most, because its technology is integrated in to TV sets from Vizio, by dint of being wholly operated by the manufacturer. Data is currently coming from more than eight million active TVs.

So how does Inscape product SVP Zeev Neumeier assess the privacy issue?

“We are the cleanest data in the market,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “The entirety of the Vizio dataset is 100% opt-in. We have a very high opt-in rate, but it’s not anywhere near 100. That makes us feel very comfortable that those people who genuinely do not feel comfortable participating in this dataset have an opportunity and are able to get out.”

In January, marketing technology firm 4C Insights inked a deal with Inscape allowing its customers to target ads on TV or social media to people who have or haven’t watched particular programs, have or haven’t been exposed to particular TV spots, or those who don’t watch linear television at all.

Unlike traditional methods of measuring audience viewing, ACR allows more granular understanding of watch time, show and channel selection, combined with more specific audience characteristics.

“There is a very clear opt-in where to the consumer is explained in layman’s terms exactly what it is we are doing in the way that is understandable and people can then choose whether they want to participate on that,” Neumeier adds.

“We only count TVs that are active, that are still opted in, that are generating clean data.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

So it was at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017 when representatives of Tru Optik, Inscape, Nielsen Catalina Solutions and Team Arrow Partners gathered on stage with moderator Joanna O’Connell, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. While there was overall cordiality, there was no mincing of words when discussing the business and technical challenges of audience measurement.

They ranged from agency compensation that accentuates cheap CPM’s over business outcomes to the speed with which campaigns can be analyzed for return on investment. After summarizing the four core ways to measure TV—panel, set-top box data, automatic content recognition (ACR) data and in-app—Tru Optik CEO Andre Swanston offered these observations on device validation and audience de-duplification:

“If I spent a million dollars with Hulu and a million dollars with NBC and a million dollars with Fox and a million dollars with Crackle, that’s great that I had 100 million impressions. How many households did I reach?” De-duplicating across multiple publishers and platforms is “not anything super sexy or exciting, but it’s some of the basic things that people come to expect across linear and digital.”

Matt O’Grady, CEO of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, cited speed to market as a big challenge. “Campaigns are running longer and longer, or somebody is always on in the marketplace, so our traditional methodology of test and control is just too slow quite honestly. So we’re investing very heavily in new models that are based upon artificial intelligence and multiple models running simultaneously so that we can get faster results and so that we can get true in-flight reads that somewhat mimic what the end result is.”

Then there’s the issue of whose data are deemed to be the most useful, according to Jodie McAfee, SVP, Marketing & Business Development at Inscape. “What we hear a lot of is ‘we think that the legacy data sets and specifically Nielsen data is flawed.’ And then people will look at our data and they’ll go ‘well this doesn’t match up with Nielsen data.’ The same people that believe that those legacy data sets are flawed have business systems and operations historically built around those datasets that you literally would have to practically blow up the entire market just to get everybody to change.”

Jason Harrison, President of Team Arrow Partners, GroupM’s dedicated agency for retailer Target, addressed one of many elephants in the room: how some agencies are compensated. “The idea that you want to target tightly to reach an audience to drive a response but you’re being held accountable to declining CPM’s is wrong, obviously. It’s misaligned. It sets up the wrong incentives.”

More than one panelist took issue with the preponderance of companies that claim to be able to do various things—leading to people at other companies burning time just trying to find the truth.

Said Swanston, whose background is in finance (J.P. Morgan), to much laughter: “I’ve never kind of experienced an industry where there’s so much smoke blown. The advertising and tech. A lot of people are full of it in this industry. And I say that in a nice way.”

Added McAfee: “There are an absolute crap-load of companies that are way out over their skies and we think it does a disservice to the market. We spend entirely too many cycles trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. As opposed to just doing our day jobs.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

“We detect at the glass” attributes of content playing on-screen, says Inscape’s SVP of Marketing & Business Development Jodie McAfee.

Those attributes are considered a “video fingerprint” for detecting everything from movies to TV shows to games.

Inscape’s technology actually detects pieces of a screen and then reassembles them on an external server to identify a particular piece of content. The company licenses data, along with IP addresses.

There’s a reason Inscape detects at the glass. “A fairly solid percentage of the behavior on our footprint is non set-top box behavior,” McAfee says. “We see all of that behavior.”

Inscape’s reach is just over 7 million TV sets across the U.S. in what amounts to “fairly close to census-level” reporting. It ingests feeds from roughly 150 national broadcast and cable networks and about 150 local feeds from DMA’s; it’s aiming for all 210 DMA’s by mid-2018.

“We maintain a standing map report against Experian demographics that we run on a pretty regular basis so that we can give people a sense of what the footprint of Vizio owners looks like,” he adds.

Data are licensed on a use-case basis and reported every hour, although there is a three-hour gap between when something aired and when the resulting data are available. Applications range from analytics to retargeting and measurement for the buy-side and sell-side of the media business.

While there’s “no such thing as the perfect data set” because ACR technology can’t tell exactly who’s watching something within a household, “it’s household-level data at scale,” says McAfee.

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.