TiVo subsidiary TiVo Research and Analytics has partnered with advertising sales platform clypd to combine TiVo’s viewer data with clypd’s cloud services to help better inform advertising purchases – and improve ROI.
This looks like a sensible move from clypd, a startup that secured $7.2 million in Series A funding at the end of 2013, and has since formed a strategic alliance with Invidi, launched its TVonTap automation API, and its Optimize package to streamline the buying and inventory management process.
The deal will combine the TiVo research data, including the True Target Index, to help content owners better understand their captive audience and consequently better value the price of their available ad slots. On the flipside, the ad buyer can get a better idea of the potential impact of their advert on the audience, as clypd will now provide both buyers and sellers with data and performance metrics generated by the TiVo data.
The pair say that this will now give users of TiVo Research’s data a mechanism to go directly from the analytics data and into a targeted investment against their optimal audience – a valuable proposition that the sales team will have to sell to potential users.
“Using privacy-compliant, aggregated, single-source data to define audiences is critical for optimizing campaigns against reach, frequency and cost targets. Using the clypd platform, media owners can enable buyers to execute transactions directly against these audiences and then use the metrics offered by TiVo Research to measure campaign impact and maximize efficiency,” said TiVo’s Chief Research Officer Jonathan Steuer.
Programmatic spending can be very simply thought of as automated scatter advertising. It allows space to be purchased and sold in a more efficient manner, and is often praised for cutting staffing costs and freeing up time to work on the quality of the adverts themselves – rather than the process of buying and selling the slots for them. This means smaller buying teams and larger creative departments, given that we haven’t yet developed computers capable of producing effective advertising.
An additional benefit of the approach is that purchasing can be altered on the fly, which allows both the agencies and the sellers to adjust negotiations according to changing circumstances – particularly useful when targeting the lucrative 18-34 age bracket and its predisposition to fast-changing trends on social media.
Programmatic buying closely resembles an auction house, where bidders try to win available space in real-time, and currently accounts for $9.25 billion in revenue according to figures from eMarketer. Those same forecasts predict that programmatic spend grew 137.1% in 2014 – largely driven by the growth of mobile, which accounted for $4.44 billion in 2014 (44.1% of total US display ad spend) and passing desktop to reach 56.2% in 2015.
The need to react dynamically to changing tastes has a growing value attached to it. As linear viewing declines, being able to get your adverts in front of the OTT viewer is increasingly important, and the programmatic method allows a buyer to quickly get a target campaign in front of what should be receptive viewers. The resulting data can then be used as feedback to inform the decisions of the advertising producers for future projects – hopefully creating better (or at least more tolerable) advertising.
“TiVo Research’s relationship with clypd is an industry-leading example of how MVPDs, broadcasters, and cable networks can maximize the value of their ad inventory by making it available for purchase in an environment optimized for transparent audience-based targeting,” added Steuer.