BOSTON – Despite the prevalence of binge viewing, as recently as 2015 marketers and media companies weren’t overly concerned about a shift to over-the-top viewing. “What we’re seeing is more of a sense of urgency in terms of trying to figure out how to measure, segment and do attribution as marketing dollars are starting to shift to over the top,” says Andre Swanston, CEO and Co-Founder of data and technology provider Tru Optik.
Tru Optik has traditionally measured owned-and-operated OTT apps plus the “open OTT system,” consisting of people downloading, streaming or sharing professionally produced content across peer-to-peer networks.
“But what we’ve realized more so over the last year is the real significant part of that really was the technology,” Swanston says in an interview with Beet.TV.
In the peer-to-peer ecosystem, there’s no device IDs, no cookies, no API’s or SDK’s to leverage. “It’s really IP, time series, user agent segmentation,” Swanston explains.
“All the core problems that legacy providers in the measurement and data management space have had in this transition to connected TV are the same problems. There’s no cookies, no device ID’s, it’s not practical to leverage an SDK across all of these fragmented connected devices,” says Swanston.
Leveraging its tech stack and patents, Tru Optik created OTT Data Cloud. In addition to Tru Optik’s media and entertainment consumption database, the OTT Data Cloud provides access to a broad range of behavioral, demographic and purchase data through partnerships with Cross Pixel, Experian Marketing Services, Media Source Solutions, TargetSmart, and V12 Group.
“That’s really where we’ve seen kind of our business explode over the last quarter. Major DSP’s, publishers and media companies are integrating our data management to be able to leverage the OTT data cloud on connected TV,” Swanston says.
We interviewed him last month at the Progress Partners Connect conference. Our coverage of the conference is sponsored by Simpli.fi. More videos from the series can be found on this page.
