LAS VEGAS — The upfronts, the annual season in which US premium content owners tout their upcoming roster of programming in a bid to win advance ad bookings, is around the corner.

But, this time, things could look a little different. So says the strategy chief of an ad-tech firm aiming to help the industry buy and sell better across four screens.

“How both the buy and the sell side are looking at the TV upfronts within 2020, which are going to begin sooner than people realise, is very, very different,” says Amobee’s Philip Smolin.

“The ability to package and sell their media the way their customers want to buy it, on an audience basis, and to be able to do that as converged packaging across all devices is fundamentally the next step for the industry.”

Smolin was speaking with Beet.TV after Amobee launched 4Screen, a software solution that uses melds both Nielsen’s TV audience panel measurement with its Gracenote data, capturing smart TV owners’ actual viewership data, to improve ad planning.

4Screen, as the package is called, works because Nielsen is now using machine learning to assign traditional demographics to the exact data produced when Gracenote’s ACR (automatic content recognition) listens to smart TV owners’ actual viewing. It works across connected TV, linear TV, mobile and desktop.

“The problem is all of those media platforms … become a highly fragmented media landscape that is very difficult to almost impossible to measure,” Smolin says.

“(It powers) planning, activation, optimization, measurement and analysis,” he adds.”

The recent 4Screen launch builds on Amobee’s earlier acquisition of Videology.

Smolin will be a speaker at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico, February 5 to 7.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of advanced TV at CES 2020 presented by Amobee and hosted by GroupM Worldwide.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.  

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews