LOS ANGELES — At this point, the clamor from ad buyers for unified TV buying and measurement has reached fever pitch.
Into that maelstrom, and just in time for Christmas, US advanced TV consortium OpenAP is launching XPm, a cross-platform measurement framework designed to reduce duplicated ad exposure.
In this video interview with Zach Rodgers for Beet.TV, David Levy, CEO, OpenAP, says he hopes the initiative will help grow advanced TV ad spend by $15 billion in the next five years.
Open IDs for all
XPm will be used by the following at launch:
- Agencies: GroupM, Dentsu group, and Horizon Media.
- Measurement: Comscore, iSpot, Nielsen, VideoAmp and 605.
- Publishers: Fox Corp, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, Walt Disney, Discovery, WarnerMedia, The Weather Channel, AMC Networks, Univision, A+E Networks and Crown Media Holdings.
“It’s going to enable advertisers to develop a campaign with one consistent audience and actually get de-duplicated reach across any national publisher and across both digital and linear at the same time,” Levy explains.
“They’ll come to us and say, ‘Hey, I have an audience at Axiom, or I have an audience at Epsilon, or I have an audience at Merkel that I want to use to activate and have a guarantee across these publishers and across multiple different platforms’.
“We then work with them centrally to take that audience and match it to a common set of open IDs. We have an open ID for everyone in the US. We have a set of open IDs for this particular audience, and then we use that same ID spine to match and create a linear segment for transaction, a digital segment, and an addressable segment if needed.
“You’re taking those open IDs and you’re matching it to linear viewership data.”
This week we announced the launch of OpenID, a unique identifier that resolves linear & digital audiences. Adopted by premium TV networks, OpenID gives advertisers the clearest path toward omni-channel planning, optimization & measurement. Read more here: https://t.co/yNV6oM4Agm pic.twitter.com/4cCoNHqSqF
— OpenAP (@OpenAPTV) April 30, 2021
Driving spend across silos
For advertisers watching declining viewership of conventional linear TV but keen on sticking with the creative canvas TV represents, new TV platforms and targeted advertising could be a key draw.
US connected TV ad spending has been growing healthily. eMarketer expects annual growth from 2022 to be slower even than 2019, however.
Early growth in the application of data-driven buying in TV had been around use of custom audience segments. But there is a growing belief that additional analytics and the use of audience IDs can grow the pie further.
“Right now advanced advertising is a $1 to $2 billion industry in television,” Levy says.
“We think what success looks like in five years is somewhere to the $10 to $15 billion mark.”
The race against waste
There is a thirst for cross-platform accuracy because there is a growing concern about wastage – in other words, over-spend by the unintended repeat reaching of the same viewer across fragmented viewing platforms.
As Levy puts it, when advertisers are going into their upfront and are allocating hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple publishers, they don’t understand how many people they’re actually reaching.
“The ability to actually have de-duplicated reach across both linear and digital is something that’s been elusive for a while,” he says.
“But now, with the ability to actually start with an audience to find as a set of IDs consistently, and then have that all brought back together at the end of the campaign, we can really unlock some exciting things.”
OpenAP’s journey
OpenAP first aimed to harmonize the meta data descriptions used by a variety of TV broadcasters in order to make selling more scaleable.
Then it made a step-change by launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.
A recent update added workflow automation and guaranteed “audience delivery” for cross-platform campaigns, and a later cross-platform initiative mark OpenAP’s own foray in to a space that is consuming everyone in advertising – multi-channel identity graphs.
OpenAP this year picked TransUnion, following its TruOptik acquisition, to power its OpenID.
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