LOS ANGELES — Ad buyers want the world of TV to throw off its analog past and begin offering planning, buying and measurement tools more akin to those they have become accustomed to in digital.

So media measurement firm Kantar is partnering with Tru Optik, an identity resolution service for connected TV, to better tackle digital planning.

This month, Tru Optik announced it was launching a connected TV-centered, self-service component for its Data Marketplace, enabling brands and agencies to log in and plan their OTT audiences directly.

Kantar is one of the data partners for doing so. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Susan Tillou, Kantar’s global head of partnerships and audience activation, explains why.

CTV is booming

Tillou says the move is a response to booming demand from stay-at-home viewers – and by advertisers to better reach them.

“It was already a strong migration that’s really gone through leaps and bounds in its growth in the first half of this year and especially the second quarter, based on people being home and just consuming media in a very different way,” she says.

“We needed to make sure that our data was also going to be there so clients could seamlessly plan and target.”

Surveys for planning

Last year, Tru Optik launched a Data Marketplace for gaming consoles. Now it is also bringing a way to leverage both third-party and first-party data across OTT devices.

It is doing so by allowing buyers to work with data from TransUnion, Oracle, Kantar, Comscore, NCSolutions, IHS Markit and more.

“We’ve got a number of syndicated studies that we run that have traditionally been used for offline planning and insights,” Tillou says. “We’ve’ve enabled cuts of those studies to be made as audiences (via Tru Optik).

“We make cuts of them available (on connected TV) so that clients, brand marketers, effectively can take those audiences and use them in offline planning and targeting, and the same audience can be used in online planning and targeting.”

Household graph

Tru Optik has its own “household graph”, a dataset on 80 million US homes’ use of streaming audio, gameplay and OTT use.

The Stamford, CT-based company’s solutions also include:

Earlier, the company partnered with SpotX to create a connected TV ads marketplace and launched a suite to support the measurement of connected TV ad efficacy.

By Robert Andrews on    @robertandrews