If you believe certain commentators, television is “dead”, it’s “dying” or the cable cord is being cut at a precipitous pace.
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.”
