LONDON – It was one of the most promising early pioneers of the digital video technology world. Could Sorenson Media finally be about to make it big?
Nielsen last year acquired Sorenson Media, the early video encoding pioneer which had since moved in to enabling household-level addressable TV ad targeting but which had since filed for bankruptcy.
Nielsen has used Sorenson to launch Nielsen Advanced Video Advertising (AVA), which sees the Sorenson tech sit alongside the automatic content recognition (ACR) capability Sorenson acquired from Gracenote, to offer ad buyers addressable capabilities.
Speaking in this video interview with Beet.TV, Brian Jentz, who was an SVP at Sorenson for five years and who is now SVP at Nielsen’s AVA, explains the way ahead.
“By the end of 2020, we want to have a scale deployment,” Jentz says. “We’re talking multi-million number of devices in the field working across at least five to 10 programmers to open up their addressable inventory, and starting to work with others to make sure that we can scale that.”
Gracenote’s ACR technology enables teal-time detection of which ads are actually being played on devices by consumers. Sorenson’s delivers targeted ads. Nielsen’s measures the ads.
Jentz says Sorenson already had some scale, calling it “one of the only ACR smart TV driven addressable TV platforms to operate at scale across 17 million TVs back in 2018/2019”.
But, over the lsat year, several initiatives and cooperatives have all come together to make the path to buying targeted TV ads at scale smoother.
“We know that we are going to be one of a few different platforms out there, and scale is going to be key to all of this,” Jentz adds. “We really want to make sure, by the end of 2020 that, not only do we have scale in our own footprint, but we’re enabling overall scale of addressable by working with other players in the industry.”
Jentz was interviewed by Furious Corp CEO Ashley J. Swartz.
This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019. This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
