LAS VEGAS\u2014With a \u201cnice running start\u201d of 11 years in the streaming video wars, Hulu is beta testing an attribution offering to correlate advertising exposures to advertisers\u2019 business outcomes. Hulu announced the offering at CES 2019<\/a> as it revealed a subscriber base of 25 million, representing \u201cpretty dramatic growth\u201d of eight million year-over-year, SVP of Advertising Sales Peter Naylor says in this interview with Beet.TV.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, advertising sales rose to just under $1.5 billion from $1 billion. \u201cWe\u2019re getting TV\u2019s largest advertisers,\u201d says Naylor, while direct-to-consumer brand revenue grew 86% \u201cand we\u2019re super serving them with some new tools.\u201d<\/p>\n Foremost in that expanding toolkit is an attribution offering from the company owned by Comcast, Fox and Disney plus an ad format that would appear when Hulu viewers pause what they\u2019re watching.<\/p>\n Hulu will develop customized attribution deals depending on the types of customer-relationship data its advertisers can share\u2014information can be matched with customer behavior metrics from Hulu, as Variety reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can elegantly put our census level data with their census level data\u201d resulting in a \u201ccensus-to-census marriage of the data to show that an exposure resulted in a sale,\u201d says Naylor.<\/p>\n Working with Telaria<\/a>, Hulu is enhancing its programmatic private marketplace for ad inventory so that \u201cwe can put people in a biddable environment for the most coveted segments.\u201d It\u2019s a closed market because \u201cwe\u2019re very protective\u201d to avoid \u201ccategory collision with our advertisers\u201d and to be able to fully vet the ad creative, Naylor adds.<\/p>\n \u201cHappily, the majority of people choose the advertising-supported Hulu but that doesn\u2019t mean we can just feel free to just jam ads at them. If anything, we have to be as respectful as possible because they\u2019re one click away from going to the commercial-free Hulu.” While the company is \u201cconventional TV with conventional breaks,\u201d it welcomes ads of any duration plus interactive units, working with partners like BrightLine<\/a> and Innovid<\/a>.<\/p>\n The \u201clatest kid on the block\u201d that Hulu is beta testing is \u201ca pause ad.\u201d When viewers hit the pause button \u201cwe\u2019re going to serve up a little image\u201d but not a display or video ad. \u201cImagine a Coke can with language like \u2018the pause that refreshes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The goal is to exploit the opportunity of \u201cknowing situationally what viewers are up to with kind of a respectful ad execution. It\u2019s an experiment that we can take because of who we are,\u201d Naylor says.<\/p>\n