Looking to bring order to the Wild West of streaming TV for advertisers, measurement company iSpot.tv said it is rolling out a new set of dedicated streaming metrics.
The metrics focus on commercials streaming on connected TVs. In addition to telling advertisers not only whether their commercials ran where they were expected to and their deduplicated reach, they provide syndicated competitive information about how competitors are spending their streaming ad dollars.
iSpot’s previous Unified Measurement metrics included streaming, but treated them as an add-on to advertisers linear spending.
“Streaming is growing so quickly that it’s no longer just incremental to linear,“ iSpot.tv CEO Sean Muller told Broadcasting+Cable. ”It’s its own massive channel that’s very hard for advertisers to measure.
“We’ve been working diligently through the metrics that matter in a streaming first world because we think in the future, it’s all going to be streaming-led,” Muller said.
iSpot streaming metrics include the percentage of impressions that hit the intended audience target, deduplicated audience identification, co-viewing and on-screen verification that ads were delivered to TVs.
“What we’ve got here is metrics that could be traded on,“ Muller said. “These are all things that you could structure a deal around.
“Our goal right now is to get the industry to understand the measurement side of streaming and really have metrics that they can trust and apply evenly across all publishers,” he continued. “The same metrics are available for linear as well and we believe this will form the foundation for future currencies in a cross-platform streaming world.”
Several iSpot clients beta-tested the new metrics, which are now live and in wide release.
Muller said that the tide is turning and that while streaming ad impressions were once incremental to broadcast, many advertisers are now taking a streaming-first approach, which pushed iSpot to create specific metrics for streaming.
“It’s what the market is demanding,” he said.
iSpot collects its streaming data from several sources, including ACR data from smart TV screens, an exclusive deal for panel data with TVision, direct integrations with 400 streaming publishers and an arrangement with The Trade Desk on all of the impressions it executes.
“We are sitting on a ton of streaming data,” Muller said.
The first releases will break out streaming by platform and publisher.
iSpot plans to release more data and market trends about streaming throughout 2024, he said.
