CHICAGO – Nielsen’s consortium that is beta-testing addressable TV advertising technology has just got a big name broadcast tester, in the shape of Hispanic TV netword Univision.

Nielsen recently began working with seven US TV networks to beta-test addressable TV advertising technology, ahead of a planned full launch later this year.

A+E Networks, AMC Networks, ViacomCBS, Discovery, Fox, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia will run dynamically swapped-out ads ads in live linear TV feeds, under the scheme launched in January. And now Univision is in on the act.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s Kelly Abcarian says: “Total TV time spent … (has) grown by 3.4% in the month of March, and that equates to 37.6 billion hours.

“If we want to unlock addressable in linear across those 37 billion hours of television, it’s important that an advertiser gets an accurate understanding of the linear reach of that ad … have confidence in the data they’re using to transact.”

Nielsen announced its beta test at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It will run in three phases – understanding broadcast companies’ workflow and commercial models, a “light” technology installation in order for broadcasters to identify which ads they want to replace, and selling actual ads that are shown in consumers’ homes.

Nielsen’s offering is the result of a series of acquisitions. Nielsen in 2018 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.

Abcarian thinks the current global pandemic has put a new spin on targeted TV ad capabilities.

“Pre-COVID, you saw about 17% of total TV time usage,” she says. “Now, the week of April 13, we have seen that that has grown to 83% from prior year. So that’s tremendous growth, and it’s eight hours per week.

“We know that the consumer is changing. And therefore, helping a marketer and a programmer understand how to package inventory, price it, as well as optimise against that experience is going to be critically important. We’re very, very focused on delivering on that total audience, reach and frequency, duplicated metric for the industry.

She credits companies like Clypd, Xandr, OpenAP, Mobi, TransUnion and LiveRamp with helping connect up platforms to deliver addressable TV ad scale.

This video is part of a series titled Navigating Accelerated Change, presented by Transunion.  For more videos, please visit this page. 

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews