Not just targeting but also fine-grain measurement of the kind that TV advertisers never had before.

That is according to one tech executive who helped a US supermarket chain use CTV to great effect.

Win-win for Winn-Dixie

In this video interview with Beet.TV, TVSquared president Jo Kinsella says her company recently helped southern supermarket operator Winn-Dixie and its media buying agency USIM deploy a campaign over Tubi, the ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) service.

“They actually didn’t believe that people were going to their website, they didn’t believe that there was going to be any website visitation at all,” Kinsella says.

“Initially, they weren’t actually interested in attribution, they were just interested in reach and frequency.”

But Kinsella says the results, which came after the team used TVSquared’s ADvantage XP to leverage a reach extension over and above linear TV and using frequency-cap reporting, were “amazing”:

• “We were able to show 79% net new households were reached by Tubi over and above what they’d reached in linear.”
• “What was staggering for the Winn-Dixie folk is that 54% of exposed audiences visited the grocer’s retailer site.”
• “Because we can see new visitors, we can see returning visitors, we can see them leaving stuff in the cart, we can see them coming back and converting… they were able to get really deep into the analysis in terms of what worked and what didn’t work.”

Spending forecast

For Kinsella, it’s yet another proof point. “It sends the message to the industry,” she says. “When you can prove that something’s working, marketers will spend more money.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

According to eMarketer, US CTV ad spending was due to total $8.11 billion in 2020, increasing to $11.36 billion in 2021. By 2024 it will reach $18.29 billion, more than double the amount spent this year.

The group expects about half of that to be programmatically traded.

That is still a small fraction of a US TV ad market worth almost $70 billion a year.

‘AVOD will win’

But Kinsella believes the advantages of connected TV will continue to become clear.

“The big thing for marketers right now – and this is where I see the CTV and the AVOD guys winning – is flexibility, transparency, and the ability to optimize,” she says.

“Because they came from a digital world, they’re very comfortable doing that, and they’re very comfortable having those types of conversations

“I think the AVOD platforms are leaning heavily in to measurement and attribution platforms because it’s a differentiator. They can prove that their stuff is working exponentially well over and above linear. They’re going to win.”

You are watching, “The Stream: New Audiences, New Opportunities,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Tubi. For more videos, please visit this page.

That is according to a man who has just leaped from helping big TV distributors sell digital ads to helping advertisers analyze and optimize new-wave TV ad spending.

“COVID’s accelerated the fragmentation of audiences – and I think that really, really forces a new measurement paradigm for television,” says Bob Ivins, the former Ampersand chief data officer who became chief strategy officer at TVSquared in September.

In this video interview with Beet.TV editorial advisor Jon Watts, Ivins says the game is on amongst upstart vendors who say they offer a far better way to measure than TV than the big competitors ever did.

We're excited to welcome Bob Ivins as our Chief Strategy Officer! He says, "TVSquared has not only built a world-class, always-on platform, but has also worked tirelessly to push the industry out of its comfort zone to change it for the better." https://t.co/Z4LkcFwUQm pic.twitter.com/3ijKdQ8Fga

— TVSquared (@tvsquared) September 21, 2020

Rebooting measurement

“I think TV is reinventing itself in front of our very eyes,” Ivins says. “Cable subscriptions are down. Streaming activity is up. I think legacy research companies are kind of struggling.

“So it gives, I think, an opportunity for innovative measurement companies like ourselves to sneak in there.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

“We have a direct to brand business that’s scaling quickly,” Ivins says. “We work with big ad sellers or big ads selling organisations. And we’ve trained 2,000, 3,000 people in a matter of weeks. And they’re out there delivering quantifiable evidence that TV drives business outcomes.”

Supply chain on the blockchain

Ivins’ new employer has recently been striking deals to extend its capabilities.

In one, TVSquared has partnered with Blockgraph, the blockchain-powered attempt to use Bitcoin-like technology to create a trusted ledger of actions in an ad transaction.

They say it will use Blockgraph’s identity and viewer authentication technology plus TVSquared’s attribution technology to offer “omni-channel TV measurement and audience activation”.

Ivins tells Beet.TV: “Blockgraph is this peer-to-peer ability to kind of re-aggregate all those audiences. That’s exciting, especially because an advertiser who launches a campaign, they’re not going to do it in one walled garden – they’re going to do it across the entire media landscape.

“You need to be able to give them metrics like cumulative unduplicated reach that cuts across platforms.”

But too few brands are doing so, because vested interests and a lack of action stand in the way.

That is according to an industry executive who is urging the supply chain to speed up.

At Beet Retreat, TVSquared president Jo Kinsella: “People are talking, but they’re not taking action.

“We need to figure out a way to play nice, and simplify what the marketer wants.

“The marketer has to win. The platform providers have to win, and we have to do it in a privacy-compliant, secure way.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

“We did a study of 2019, a thousand advertisers using our attribution platform, (they) reduced their cost per response by 41%, and increased their TV spend by 91%,” Kinsella added.

“We come to these conferences and we stand up and we talk and we are all passionate about it, and then we leave and do fuck all. Just take the step. Just to do it. Just take the step. Just do it.”

Kinsella was interviewed by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where she 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. 

Over the last year, we have seen several technology companies apply such technology even to linear TV broadcasters, using either automatic content recognition (ACR) that can “listen” to what audiences are really watching or using a traditional panel system.

Now TVSquared is launching a cross-platform, multi-touch attribution system for over-the-top (OTT) connected (TV), and is taking a different approach.

“For the OTT stuff, we wanted to go about it slightly differently,” says Jo Kinsella, TVSquared’s president.

“(Since October), we have added on probably 20 or so publishers. That’s different because we wanted to be able to capture 100% of every impression served on OTT and CTV, rather than just depending on a matched panel, which may be six to eight million. If you’re only capturing OTT … you are probably getting about 1% of the United States. We wanted to be able to tag at the ad server so we see every single impression that gets served.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

“Because we’ve already tagged the website of the advertiser, we can immediately tie that back to performance and see reach, frequency, performance, and full impression based attribution,” Kinsella adds.

Kinsella will be a speaker at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, three days of high-level panels, group conversations, one-on-one video interviews, networking events and interactions.

“There’s an argument between performance and brand,” says Smeaton. “Both are important, but I think for a long time it’s been all about brand and I think TV struggled against digital threats from Facebook and Google by not having proof of performance.”

The more buy-in there is from brands, the more it will help to shift trends towards performance. Smeaton also notices a wave of advertisers moving to OTT in order to get better response rates and know who they’re targeting among other advantages.

“We’re already seeing some of our brands go from a test-and-learn strategy in 2019 to moving from 10 to 15 percent of the budget to 30, 40, 50 percent of their budgets moving toward OTT [for next year], so big changes are coming within the next 12 months,” says Smeaton.

As a new decade approaches, Smeaton hopes that the importance on big data will shift towards little data. It’s this smaller data that can be more efficient to advertisers, especially as OTT continues to evolve at a faster pace.

“It’s the insight that matters,” says Smeaton. “When can we get insights in a timely fashion, not three months after the fact, after we’ve analyzed all this big data. I need it now, I need to be able to act on it, and I need it in real time.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Ampersand, the former NCC Media, has announced a partnership with TVSquared, a technology vendor whose attribution offering links ad exposure data with actual outcome data.

According to that announcement: “Advertisers can now track the influence of TV campaigns on lower-funnel activities, including website traffic and sales. Granular TV insights across different days, dayparts, networks and creatives are tracked in real-time by TVSquared, and leveraged to inform where changes can be made to achieve KPIs and improve performance across all TV investments.”

TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

“Proof of performance is becoming increasingly important for the sell-side as it identifies ways to support the continued growth of TV investments,” said Jo Kinsella, EVP and CRO, TVSquared.

Operated by Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications, NCC Media launched in 1981 to provide a common way for ad buyers to get on to disparate and disconnected cable, satellite and now telco networks.

It recently rebranded itself to “Ampersand“, just one of a raft of announcements as it reinvents itself for a new age of TV.

Here, we are republising our interview with Kinsella from this past August’s Beet.TV leadership event at GroupM.  In the video, Kinsella explains the alliance with Comcast Spotlight.

In it, she said: “TV viewership has gone up and actually, we’re seeing media dollars come back to television because now we can prove that it’s working.”

That is according to an executive whose software company’s insights have been encouraging hundreds of advertisers to greatly increase their spending in the medium.

TVSquared helps power Instant Impact, an analytics platform at Comcast Cable’s Spotlight ad sales unit which shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.

The relationship started with a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out was announced this month. Comcast Spotlight has also said it intends to apply Instant Impact to more customer types outside of automotive.

Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, spoke with Ashley J. Swartz, CEO, Furious Corp, in this recorded discussion at Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” in August.

TV is resurgent

“Television, to me, has the opportunity to thrive, not just survive now,” Swartz said.

“(In TV), we’re really not … losing money to digital,” Kinsella concurred. “We see (advertising) people coming back all the time. We have advertisers on the platform in 72 different countries right now, soon to be probably up at a hundred countries.”

She said one advertiser on the platform, which spent $1 million on TV three years ago, this year plans to spend $40 million.

Attribution unlocks value

The “game-changer” is attribution technology. Historically, TV has been viewed as a brand-building medium, at the top of marketing funnels; it has been difficult to prove how television commercials prompt actions like store visitation or, particularly, purchase.

That has caused many marketers to turn away from linear local TV, finding they can get results and proven effectiveness in digital channels.

“Now we can measure it and make it accountable,” Kinsella said. “We’ve seen advertisers double their spend, double their commitment, saying, ‘I’m not just going to advertise for three months, I’m not just going to do a Pulse campaign, I’m going to do an annual commitment, because now you’ve shown me that TV. is working’.”

An incremental comeback

Kinsella doesn’t expect the return of ad flow to local TV will happen overnight. Rather than place all their money on black, she imagines ad buyers making iterative changes, testing to discover exactly how TV can demonstrably fuel performance.

“When they’ve done that for a couple of months and they see that it’s driving more response, whatever the response might be, they say, ‘Oh, this is working, let’s keep doing it’. We have clients that have been optimizing now weekly, monthly… for three, four, five years.”

The future is measurable

Kinsella acknowledges that many in TV land are “terrified” of data-driven, automated TV ad sales. But she expects they will come around when all kinds of TV are made measurable.

“It just changes the whole TV ecosystem, if we can now measure everything, whether it’s a digital platform or a linear platform,” she says.

“It’s about serving up an analytics platform that allows our clients to choose their KPIs and to tie TV performance, whether it’s linear or digital, back to business outcomes. That’s the future.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit. Please visit this page for additional segments.

But the emergence of digital attribution technologies plugged in to local TV ad sales now promises to bring ad spending back to local TV operators.

That is according to one TV ad-tech platform which is watching an in-flux on money back to certain operators.

“We’ve seen (certain) automotive dealers double their spend (with) local TV),” says Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“And it’s not just about doubling spend. It’s also been about committing to much longer-term campaigns to the point where Comcast is saying (to advertisers), ‘You know what? Let’s sign up for a longer commitment because now you know it works’.”

Kinsella’s TVSquared helps power Instant Impact, an analytics platform at Comcast Cable’s Spotlight ad sales unit which shows the impact on web traffic from airing an ad on Comcast, within 30 minutes of transmission.

In this Beet.TV interview with Maryann Halford, senior advisor at MTM Consulting, Kinsella says the relationship started with a proof-of-concept in three to five markets, followed with a pilot involving 25 advertisers and the full roll-out announced this week.

Comcast Spotlight has also said it intends to apply Instant Impact to more customer types outside of automotive.

“TV viewership has gone up and actually, we’re seeing media dollars come back to television because now we can prove that it’s working,” Kinsella adds.

Local media is widely seen as offering untapped potential for targetability and, because it is often a patchwork of distinct designated market areas (DMAs), the ability to incrementally boost reach.

That potential is slowly being unlocked, as local TV operators plug in a new wave of software.

“They’re able tie (TV ad exposure) back to lower-funnel metrics,” Kinsella boasts. “But I think the easiest way to explain it is really proof of performance All of a sudden, in the same way that we’ve been able to measure digital all these years, we can now measure TV in the same way.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight, TVSquared and WideOrbit.   Please visit this page for additional segments. 

“We absolutely know that we have to get beyond the core linear product because we want to essentially be platform agnostic,” says VP of Research & Insights Andrea Zapata. “Just as we are now network agnostic when it comes to reaching customers and making our recommendations, just as we are now daypart agnostic.”

In this interview with Beet.TV, Zapata explains how it’s “still early days here” in proving the value of TV beyond simple ad recall and viewer sentiment. “I think for television now it’s absolutely crucial that we start proving our value as we go down that funnel. It’s not just good enough to say that we got people to see your ad.”

Comcast Spotlight’s approach is rooted in the belief that if it’s going to be making audience targeting recommendations, it should be able to prove they worked. “For us, attribution is did the person who saw your ad take an action and can we measure that. We know you’re going to measure it. You absolutely should. It’s your responsibility,” says Zapata.

Deciding on partners is “a very rigorous process,” she adds. “I always say God bless our vendors because they have to go on this journey with us.”

With TVSquared, the process started with a proof of concept followed by a pilot and scaling. “We’re in north of sixty markets, so for us we’ve got thousands of sellers and thousands upon thousands of clients. We want to make sure the solution that we’re building for can answer core questions and scale appropriately.”

Initially, Comcast sought to determine if exposure to TV commercials drove website traffic for advertisers, whose websites are tagged by TVSquared. “They get the option of two KPI’s or two pages based on their campaign objectives,” Zapata says.

Within 30 days, Comcast sales personnel and advertisers can log into dashboard “and see if there was any lift to performance after exposure to an ad. For us it wasn’t good enough to see lift website over a long period of time,” so Comcast chose to use a 30-minute window of time after exposure to an ad.

It’s a case of correlation as opposed to causation. “Giving the right credit to television but not all credit,” says Zapata.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

Zapata will be a speaker at the #BeetRetreat  August 7 at GroupM.  Here is the speaker line-up:

Kelly Abcarian, GM, Video Advanced Advertising, Nielsen, @kellyabcarian

Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader for Media & Entertainment, E&Y, @digitalstrategy

Mike Bologna, President, one2one Media, Cadent, @CadentTV

Tim Castree, CEO, GroupM North America, @castree

Marc Cestaro, Director, Addressable Lead, MODI Media, @ModiMedia

Brendon Condon, CRO, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

Jennifer Donohue, VP, Local Advertising Sales, Hulu, @hulu

Bob Ivins, Chief Data Officer, NCC Media, @bobivins

Ryan Jamboretz, Chief Development Officer, Amobee Broadcaster Solutions, @r_jamboretz

Jo Kinsella, CRO & EVP, TVSquared, @JoKinsellaTVS

Joe Marchese, Entrepreneur In Residence & Co-Founder, Human Ventures, @joemarchese

Brian Norris, SVP, Direct to Consumer, Ad Sales, NBCU, @thebriannorris1

Joanna O’Connell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, @joannaoconnell

Olga Ramos, President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Puerto Rico, @BGCPR

Sean Robertson, General Manager, Partnerships, DISH Media, @DISHMedia

Howard Shimmel, President, Janus Strategy & Insights, @HowardShimmel

Philip Smolin, Chief Strategy Officer, Amobee, @philipsmolin

Ashley Swartz, CEO & Founder, Furious Corp., @RedFuryNYC

Brian Wallach, SVP, CRO, Advanced TV, Freewheel, @bw10

Andrea Zapata, VP, Research & Insights, Comcast Spotlight, @ComcstSpotlight

That is according to one executive who is seeing advertisers double their TV ad spending as a result.

“For as long as we started this company, people have been talking about TV media dollars going away, declining,” says Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“Actually, what we’ve seen is, especially in local, where we’re really able to line up the local inventory, people are saying, ‘Wait. Now I can prove that this works. Now I can see that actually this inventory is driving engagement for my advertiser. I’m going to give these guys some more money’.”

The opportunity is opening up because cable operators are making more inventory addressable to advertisers – not just the two minutes per hour historically given over, but all of the available time – and because more of that advertising can be delivered direct to devices, rather than through the cable operators.

That lightbulb moment happens because of technology from the likes of TVSquared, which helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

TVSquared research recently found that 50% to 70% of all performance outcomes for direct-to-consumer brands’ TV ads occurred on mobile devices.

“We’ve had car dealers that potentially only spend $20,000 a month now spending $40,000 a month, because they’ve been able to prove (effectiveness),” Kinsella adds. “They’re like, ‘Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll give you more money to spend’.”

This video is part of a series from the Beet Retreat in the City, “We’re Going Local!” hosted by GroupM Worldwide and sponsored by Amobee, Comcast Spotlight and TVSquared.   Please visit this page for additional segments. 

But, if you a rival of Data Plus Math, that eye-popping deal isn’t a threat, it’s to be welcomed.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, issues a message to Data Plus Math.

“We were actually really happy about that deal because it brings performance (advertising) to the forefront,” she says. “I think we feel like we’ve been talking about it for a long time. I’ve sat on a ton of panels and said, ‘This is the way the world is moving’. I think the acquisition of Data Plus Math really proves that that’s kind of what the industry wants and needs.”

Data Plus Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversion.

Kinsella’s own TVSquared helps brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

Kinsella thinks all performance’s boats are rising.

“Performance is hot because it’s all about return on (advertisers’) investment,” she says. “Tying performance back to business outcomes, I think the advertiser base is now demanding that. Finally, it feels like the industry is a turning point.

“This kind of pivotal direction that we’re now heading in, which is we want to be able to measure … we want to be able to optimize in the same way that we do (in) digital for TV, and that’s why we’re here.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

Performance has always been a priority for the retailer geared to millennial men “because we grew up in the digital realm, where everything could be tracked and you can attribute revenue specifically to ad campaigns,” Hum says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.

“What we don’t like is a general if you spend it you’ll just kind of see it materialize somewhere and it’s all kind of wishy washy. It’s really important for us to be able to measure the actual performance of television and not just kind of throw the money into the air and hope it comes back to use later on.”

Hum was one of the main presenters at the VAB session, along with Peloton Founder & CEO John Foley. For TV campaign attribution, Touch of Modern— which offers unique and new-to-market products not easily found at retailers—works with TVSquared.

“We measure a baseline of traffic before and after each airing and then we attribute the spike in traffic to television,” says Hum, noting that the company’s most important KPI’s are “sales, signups and sessions.”

His key takeaway for other companies is that “TV nowadays can be measured just as precisely as digital, and it’s really important to have a diversified portfolio when it comes to marketing.”

Launched in 2012, Touch of Modern shot its first iteration of a TV commercial using its employees and an in-house production team. While it worked pretty well, version #2 created largely by Marketing Architects “opened up new markets. Things that didn’t work before suddenly started working with the new creative.”

One way in which creative for digital media differs from TV is that “every banner is pretty short-lived, whereas the creative you produce for television tends to have a longer life span.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

One of them is TVSquared, a company helping brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

Whilst the ability to attribute website visitation back to TV ad exposure seems like something from the future, TVSquared is one of the suppliers enabling it today.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, says national brands don’t necessarily have a one-up in this regard.

“Local has really been one of our fastest growing areas in the last 12 months,” Kinsella says.

“From a local cable standpoint, the ability of inventory is significantly bigger, the spot count is bigger.

“Smaller advertisers don’t spend as much as they do on the national side but actually have the ability to flex spend, increase spend relatively quickly (and) also make changes to the media buy.”

So, what exactly can attribution from TV ads through to websites do for a brand?

Kinsella says the growing crop of direct-to-consumer brands is especially interested in the possibilities.

Despite often being digital-only, many such brands are spending heavily on TV exposure – but they nevertheless want to benefit from the kinds of measurement they have seen in digital.

“What they’re doing is, they’re making these changes and then they’re running another (campaign) flight and they’re seeing actual increases in sales or conversions or whatever their business KPI is,” Kinsella explains.

It all falls under the category of “teaching TV new tricks”.

Kinsella observes: “We’ve seen articles over the last couple of weeks that say, ‘Maybe we said TV was dead a little bit too early’. And certainly what we’re seeing is the way you can prove TV works people are actually moving money back into TV.

“We have clients that we’ve actually written about before that credit TVSquared insights with 30% increase in sales. We have clients that have come on with an initial TV strategy that have then ended up spending three times what they’d originally planned to.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

“From a measurement perspective and understanding viewership and consumption, we are partnering with Inscape to complement our Comcast set-top box footprint,” FreeWheel’s Brian Wallach says in this interview with Beet.TV. “We will be the largest footprint where you can actually get an understanding of deterministic viewership and consumption of digital video content across every screen.”

The SVP and CRO of Advanced TV says FreeWheel is “leaning into being able to show incremental reach” to advertisers using a national campaign or a targeted one on linear TV “and also the complementary digital delivery that’s happening in our footprint and across the Inscape footprint as well.”

The goal is to be able to determine whether someone watched a program on TV or digital and did an advertiser reach them in one or both environments because “there’s light TV viewers, heavy TV viewers, all types of consumption that’s happening across screen,” Wallach says.

When it comes to campaign KPI’s, every advertiser is different. Some are as simple as brand metrics measured with the help of research studies while others are looking for down-funnel conversion.

“As a marketer defines what their KPI’s are, we help them with different providers to match up whether or not the media that was shown to those consumers actually drove that behavior. That’s a growing trend.”

According to Wallach, some marketers could look to seek different audience guarantees from publishers that are based on campaign outcomes, as “guaranteeing delivery of impressions is somewhat not enough these days. Obviously, this is important for our publishing partners as well.”

He describes TVSquared as “a very valuable attribution partner for us. They really help us understand how to optimize a campaign and try to drive impressions against inventory that is yielding good results.”

While campaign performance beyond mere impression delivery has traditionally taken “months and months,” TVSquared provides “a rolling report on information that’s happening with those interactions, where we can actually optimize a campaign, maybe move inventory from one publisher to another based on performance” and do creative optimization.

Better analytics at the local level means that search no longer gets 100% local attribution, according to Wallach.

“We have data that can show exposures across TV, exposures across digital and then the corresponding interactions with search where they’re getting a location or address for a particular store and then visiting it,” says Wallach.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.

This typically means selecting one or two dayparts and perhaps five or six networks in all and maybe a sports package, Zapata explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“Those clients of ours who buy in a very specific way, they will get lift to their website,” she says. “But with the same budget, and this is what’s incredible for me, if they’re willing to take a more data-driven approach to their planning and buying process, and they open it up to all day” the results multiply.

“If they open up the five to seven networks or the sports package to forty-plus networks, which I know sounds crazy, but that’s where your customer might be.”

Zapata says in that scenario, results can go from a 2-3% lift to as much as 8%.

“What we have found is that the reach can go from twenty percent of your backyard to sixty percent of your backyard. Reach is vitally important, so use TV for what it’s good at, don’t constrict your customer you can yield better outcomes.

“So what our guts once told us is actually being demonstrated with validation outside of just our guts.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium.  For more segments, please visit this page.  This series is presented by TVSquared.

In 2013 and 2014, direct-to-consumer marketers were the biggest TV attribution enthusiasts, Smeaton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Among the first of the company’s insights was the anomaly that “the fastest growing part of the TV spend was coming from e-commerce companies and direct-to-consumer companies. And that was fascinating to me.”

TVSquared discovered that it was “the forward-looking brands, a lot of the DTC brands, that really kind of grabbed TV attribution and ran with it,” Smeaton says. He cites as clients Credit Karma and Expedia, “Brands that have really helped shape this space.”

With its roots in linear-TV ad attribution and optimization, “In the U.S. we can take connected TV device data, take our approach, blend it together and then show have TV actually works for them and help them improve performance.”

TVSquared drops pixels on its clients’ websites, germinating a trove of response data for correlating downstream conversion. “We can get response via website, via apps, via SMS, via phone. And then we take when the TV airs and then we look at how we can get a lift that TV has produced because of the spots that have run,” Smeaton says.

Adding deterministic data to the mix can “enhance that and provide more information not just on the lift but also on the audience and which demographics are working for them.”

Two to three years ago, agencies got more interested in TV attribution, according to Smeaton. “They were looking at how they can retain clients and win new business by showing that insight into how they can optimize TV.”

Lastly came media owners and broadcasters looking to protect their revenue turf amid a wave of change in TV content, distribution and monetization. “We’re now seeing the full range of the ecosystem looking at TV attribution and how to use it.”

Within the last couple of years, TVSquared begin assisting the sales side at broadcasters in Europe. “I think they were quite early in realizing that proof of performance to prove that TV advertising works is going to be key going forward with how you sell TV advertising. I think now we’ve seen the same in the U.S. We’re working with a number of the MPVD’s already, we’re working with a number of the broadcasters as well,” Smeaton says.

Asked how his company differentiates itself from others in the attribution business, he cites being “global since day one,” a hybrid approach of combing advanced-TV data with its own solution that provides a “scale and range that others can’t,” along with an easy-to-use, end-to-end platform.

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium.  For more segments, please visit this page.  This series is presented by TVSquared.

But that is only because, without access to return-path data, TV has never been able to boast the kinds of user attribution that new digital media do.

Now that TVs have got connected, however, all that is changing – and one ad-tech exec thinks this turns on its head the place of TV in the funnel.So,

“I think the big thing for us is to look at TV as a performance channel,” says Jo Kinsella, TVSquared chief revenue officer, in this video interview with Beet.TV.

TVSquared is a company helping brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

But Kinsella doesn’t need a viewer to click from their TV to a website. TVSquared uses a range of other data to establish whether a viewer exposed to an ad took a follow-up action that led to a purchase.

“We get post logs … the time that the ad aired, and then we would typically deploy a pixel tracker to a website,” she says. “We will integrate with an app company to get app downloads or registrations. We take phone data. We take good old fashion SMS data. You name it, we’ve seen it all over the last six years.”

Kinsella credits “digital-thinking CMOs” that are now beginning to draw a line from linear TV to digital performance. Companies like Untuckit, Placed, Hello Fresh and Third Love are using the new capability, she says.

“You should be able to measure (TV) and optimize it,” Kinsella adds. “Linear wasn’t cool for a while, but actually people are realizing that it still has the quickest and easiest way to get reach and to get the name out there and to really drive sales or registrations, whatever the KPI is.”

Beet.TV recorded this interview at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York City.

Truth is, says Kevin O’Reilly, whilst TV is changing, the medium will remain the dominant influence channel for a good few years.

That’s why O’Reilly is chief technology officer at TVSquared, a company helping brands learn how TV advertising is driving traffic to their websites.

“A friend of (founder) Calum (Smeaton) … said, ‘Look, I know that TV’s working, I just don’t know which bits’,” O’Reilly, describing the company’s formation, says in this video interview with Beet.TV.

“A lot of the things that we’re used to seeing traditionally in CRM or in digital, we’re bringing on to the TV platform.”

One of the company’s two main software pieces is ADvantage, a platform providing offering insight in to how each TV impression drives revenue through online, mobile and second screen for advertisers looking for accurate same-day TV attribution.

The company’s Predict tool helps advertisers automate the creation of their buy specifications based on predictive analysis of historical attribution data that is optimized, whether the objective is to generate sales, registrations, web site visits or any other kind of response.

Now Edinburgh-based TVSquared has more than 600 brand customers in almost 60 countries and, after striking a deal with LiveRamp to better segment audiences, plans to take on machine learning capabilities. But the world isn’t moving away from TV as some may say.

“This market is fragmenting very, very quickly,” O’Reilly adds. “But the reality is, when we take a look out the next two, to five years … the changes that are happening in pay TV being relatively slow – the world’s changing but at about five percent per year.

“You first have to be able to measure the impact that TV’s having in linear before you can start stitching it together in all of those directly deterministic measurements. You have to start looking at basically TV as being total video, not just linear television.”