SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—iSpot.tv has been a third-party television data provider for the past five years. So when Robert Bareuther hears someone at Beet Retreat 2018 talk about third-party verification and measurement as being “royalty right now,” he takes a bow of sorts.
“It’s like de facto. And that’s pretty cool. Maybe iSpot should get our crown pretty soon, because we’re rapidly becoming a really trusted third-party analytics provider for TV advertising,” the SVP, Business Development, says in this interview.
iSpot.tv started as a measurement company that could track TV ads in real time, according to Bareuther. “We built a syndicated product that measured TV ads and it became really popular for brands.”
About four years ago, the company started a partnership with smart TV manufacturer VIZIO to get access to ad impressions as they appear, based on automatic content recognition.
“So we’ve taken all this raw data from what’s appearing on screens second by second and do a lot of data work and data science around that,” Bareuther says.
There’s a range of information gleaned, including whether the ads are being seen live, via DVR or OTT, plus the pods and the shows in which the ads appeared. A typical analysis will include the number of airings of a spot, the estimated advertiser spend, the number of impressions, attention and engagement scores and percentage of share of voice.
The next step was being able to show what happened after viewers had seen the ads, as happens with much of digital advertising.
“Brands are spending so much money on TV and they’re spending so much money on digital and they know what’s happening in digital immediately. They get long feedback loops from TV,” Bareuther says.
iSpot.tv set out to shrink that feedback loop. “So we figured out a way to understand household consumption of television ads” so that advertisers could blend it into their marketing stacks, through LiveRamp, Adobe, Oracle et cetera. And help them understand themselves how it’s being effective.”
Asked whether any of its clients have enough outcomes data to be able to use it not just for back-end measurement but for planning purposes, Bareuther says yes.
“In order to get to the bottom of the funnel the first step is always to have the top of the funnel. Once we can say that this NBC show is more effective for you X retailer than this ABC show or this Bravo show or vice versa, maybe could use it to optimize your planning.”
This video was produced in San Juan, Puerto Rico at the Beet.TV executive retreat. Please find more videos from the series on this page. The Beet Retreat was presented by NCC along with Amobee, Dish Media, Oath and Google.
