SAN FRANCISCO — It is often said that, when it comes to advanced TV advertising, the UK has a lead through the Sky’s AdSmart offering.
But, when it comes to insights in to advanced TV advertising, one company is now bringing capabilities to Europe that it says have existed in the US for years.
Alphonso‘s offering brings the ability to retarget consumers with ads on digital devices based on TV-viewing cues. It does that using audio content recognition build in to devices in its footprint, including smart TVs, mobile phones and set-top boxes. That underlying technology is now going global.
“What’s starting to happen now is, beyond U.S., some of these integrations are rolling out in some of the European countries, and it is a phenomenal new dataset unleashed in that market,” says Ashish Chordia, Alphonso CEO. “What was happening in the U.S. in 2014, 2015, is now going to happen in some of the European countries.”
Alphonso last year launched Insights, an offering giving in to the airings, spend and exposure for US TV ads. It can tell you, for instance, where Amazon has been spending its money to advertise its Echo speaker’s multi-room audio capability.
The global spread of the chips and tech that support Alphonso’s content monitoring means Insights, too, can go global.
“We are starting out with the UK first,” Chordia says. “We just released our Insights product in private beta couple of weeks ago for select set of partners. We anticipate that will be publicly available within the next 90 days.
“What that means is, for the first time in the history of United Kingdom, there will be a place where someone can go, insights-uk.alphonso.tv, and see every single ad that are on local broadcast or cable, whether they’re running on Sky, or Channel 5, or Channel 6, or Channel 4.
“They’re going to be able to see digital-quality insights, just like we do in the US now for UK ads available in UK.”
If the idea that their TV could be listening or watching for their viewing habits, reporting it back to tech companies and advertisers, is enough to spook some viewers in parts of Europe, Chordia says his practice is above-board.
“Because Alphonso is on the consumer device, has a consumer touch point, we’re actually in a much stronger position than most data companies, in that being able to collect the consent from the consumer in the right fashion,” he says.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
