Advertising-supported streaming television provider Tubi has a new partnership with Samba TV to measure reach and frequency gaps across linear and OTT. The move comes as Tubi is introducing first-position, guaranteed ad pod impressions along with 60- and 90-second formats, trailers and sponsorships.
“The marketplace for ad-supported is a coiled spring,” Tubi Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat says in this interview with Beet.TV.
In discussing increased demand from advertisers, Rotblat recalls that during last year’s TV UpFront season, some buyers wished to finish their negotiations with linear TV provider before committing money to ad-supported OTT platforms.
“It’s different this year. This year they are planning OTT alongside their traditional TV, their cable and broadcast. And the reason is that they got burned” by “over-promising and under-delivering” linear audiences.
“It’s just too difficult to move the money into ADU’s from one quarter to the next,” Rotblat says, referring to audience-deficiency units. “They need to run flighting and get reach to their target audiences. So this is the place and now’s the time.”
Tubi’s collaboration with Samba TV and its automatic content recognition alliances with smart-TV companies will help to “bridge the measurement gap” of reach and frequency from traditional TV to OTT.
“The results that we’ve seen in the campaigns we’ve done are very promising. Because there’s not just low overlap to television buys but even low overlap to other OTT,” Rotblat says. For example, he cites data from consumer research firm MRI as showing just a 22% overlap between Hulu and Tubi.
“Working with our platform is pretty easy because Samba has built the technology. So it’s really just a pixel implementation.”
Rotblat cites a “super panel” from some 3.5 million, Samba-enabled smart-TV’s that see everything people are watching. “They can understand duplication of that ad or frequency to a specific target.” IP-enabled television and devices within a home can reveal “other behaviors in the home” and correlate them to advertising exposures.
Even as consumers have begun to mix and match subscription-TV services to their liking, some advertisers have held off from committing to the OTT space, according to Rotblat. He mentions research suggesting that Americans will ultimately choose two TV apps. “It leaves this wide open field for free, ad supported for everything else they get.”
At Tubi’s Digital Content NewFront presentation, the company announced longer-form advertising opportunities, including 60- and 90-second formats, trailers and sponsorships. This is in addition to the new opportunity for advertisers to “target and get guaranteed impressions for the first position in the pod.”
Tubi also unveiled an exclusive deal with global content leader Lionsgate to bring all 100 episodes of Debmar-Mercury and sister company Lionsgate Television’s comedy Anger Management to its customers.
This video is part of a series about the emergence of OTT as an advertising platform. For more interviews, please visit this page. This series is presented by Premion.
