Whilst national TV networks upgrade their technology to support better targeting, buying and measurement of TV and digital video ads, local TV operators risk being left out.
That is according to one technology supplier who doesn’t, as some might, see local as back water – he sees it as an opportunity.
“One of the parts of the industry that hasn’t really been deeply touched by attribution … has been local,” says Ashish Chordia, Alphonso CEO, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Local TV is a $20 billion industry … and it’s continuing to grow.
“The piece that was always hard to do for local providers was to be able to say, ‘I ran the ad for the local car dealership, or the local dentist, and I produced results’.”
So Alphonso, which already helped customers understand what content or ads consumers were watching by using automated content recognition (ACR) software in viewing devices, spent a year to build some new technology.
Chordia calls it “video AI” that tackles a “hard technology problem” – namely, how you can identify what people are watching when the fingerprints for that content are patchy.
A year after Alphonso began, local TV channel operator TEGNA recently disclosed that it had chosen Alphonso’s data and analytics to show the effectiveness of linear TV and OTT. That followed months of pilot testing that have produced encouraging results.
Chordia tells Beet.TV that Alphonso will announce more such partnerships.
“Fifteen million smart TV homes report data to us,” he says. “TV to digital retargeting is a concept we invented.”
A recent Alphonso integration with PlaceIQ grew its ability to correlate TV ad viewing with consumers’ subsequent visitation to a marketers’ retail location.
