Sometimes, being early to a particular party isn’t a good thing. In the case of TiVo, inventor of the digital video recorder, it’s always had lots of second-by-second data about television viewing—today’s Holy Grail—but most of it was “bad news” about program skipping and fast-forwarding, says TiVo executive Tara Maitra.
“We knew we had something very valuable, but it was hard to make it actionable,” Maitra, who is SVP and GM of Content and TiVo Research, recalls in an interview with Beet.TV. “For years clients would look at our data and say that our methodology is superior, but what they have is good enough.”
Things started to change in 2012 with TiVo’s acquisition of The Right Audience. Now the party is coming to TiVo, as more marketers harness audience and behavioral data to optimize TV ad spending in a programmatic fashion, to the tune of roughly five percent of overall annual spend.
“So what you are going to see in the next year, if we are sitting here having this conversation, I would expect that percentage to grow from 5 to somewhere closer to 10%,” Maitra predicts.
TiVo has viewing from 2.3 million households that it matches on a one-to-one basis with external TV viewing data and then with other sources of data about such things as consumer purchases, website visits and location.
“That allows us to complete the loop, so that as part of the buying and planning process we can help advertisers find the audiences that they want to find on TV. We can then help those same advertisers find those same audiences where they are digitally,” Maitra says.
She cites a study TiVo Research conducted with A&E Networks, Turner Broadcasting and the consultancy 84.51° and involving 15 consumer packaged-goods brands. Among other things, it showed that for every dollar decline in television ad spend, 11 of the brands lost three times that amount in return.
“I think in the last year what we have seen is advertisers are finally embracing this concept of programmatic and audience buying for television,” Maitra says. “It’s existed in digital but it hadn’t really become more of a mainstream concept for TV.”
This interview is part of a series on the future of TV analytics and measurement sponsored by TiVo Research. Please visit this page for additional segments.
