CANNES — Imagine a future in which a brand advertised to you through your TV, then followed you out of your apartment, down the street, in to the store and inside the movie theater.
That future is now, as a new crop of TV ad data companies is rising up to offer not just TV ad tracking – but tracking of real-world viewer movements motivated by the ads.
One of those companies is Alphonso, which says it is finding the movie theater to be a key areana for the new technology.
“Movie studios spend a lot of money on television – they want to know who are the people who went and saw the movie,” says Alphonso chief product officer Raghu Kodige, in this video interview with Beet.TV”
Alphonso’s technology, which the company claims is on TV viewing devices in a third of US TV households as well as on smartphones, can see whether a TV viewer has seen a TV ad for a movie, then can see whether that viewer is sitting in her chair in the theater.
Does Alphonso know whether she also bought popcorn? In fact, it does, as the company also looks at consumers’ credit card records to find purchases and attribute them back to that original TV ad.
Isn’t there a consumer privacy concern in all of this? “If they are aware of it, they are happy to give consent,” Kodihge adds. “The holy grail of advertising is to figure out what is working.”
This video is from The Advanced TV Summit at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by Alphonso. For more from the series, please visit this page.