A Big Step for Set Top Box Data

Tracey Scheppach EVP Precision Video SMG long a champion of settop box data and addressable TV commercials had once famously created buttons of herself in the style of WWIIamp8217s Rosie the Riveter proclaiming quotFree the Dataquot On May 14 Linda Yaccarino Chairman of Advertising Sales NBCUniversal announced that the new NBCU Audience Targeting Platform will now be fueled with settop box data from Comcastamp8217s 20 million subscribersAdmittedly this is not exactly what Tracey has been pulling for In her and my visions more than ten years ago the industry benefitted the most by everyone having affordable access to the data as often as desired In the new world announced on May 14 access to the data comes when the seller chooses to make it available to the ready buyer This means that the seller will choose the package the seller wishes the buyer to buy in the traditional manner but now supported by and optimized in relation to set top box data and advertiser data matched to it in the directmatch anonymized nofusion manner invented by TiVo Research in 2006The buyer can be expected to ask for other specific ways of looking at the data and the seller can be expected to cooperate in the interest of closing a bigger better deal The buyer can be expected to constantly emphasize the ratio of cost to targets reached and ROI These are very healthy developments that benefit everyone and Comcast deserves a big round of applause for this Without having the space here to mention everyone who deserves thanks this includes Linda Yaccarino Charlie Thurston Hank Oster Andrew Ward Sam Schwartz Rob Holmes Ed Bressel Frank Foster and many others at ComcastNBCUBut this is not an isolated event Almost simultaneously two other shoes droppedCharter Media for a long time the major source of amp8220freedamp8221 settop box data announced that it shall henceforth be known as Spectrum Reach and shall be built around dashboards for mobilizing crossmedia data including settop box data advertiser data and thirdparty data to make the most perfectlytargeted buys possibleCablevision announced the release of 7 million settop boxes worth of settop box data to DisneyABCESPN based on about 3 million subscriber homes in New York Time Warner Cox and Brighthouse might be expected to make similar moves in the near future amp8212 or notIn the early days of CDsDVDs Hollywood studios had held back from setting license fees for those media imagining that they could sell those far more dearly than turned out to be the case although home video definitely provided a landslide of incremental revenues In much the same way since Next Century Media demonstrated in 1997 that settop box data could with proper algorithms be used to provide research grade audience data under the strictest of privacy protection the MVPDs have held back from selling the settop box data envisioning that it is a key asset for use in negotiating vast increases in advertising and data revenues This had the unfortunate side effect of leaving TV somewhat unprotected from the charms of digital and this catching up in May 2015 is a historic market adjustment under pressure from digital handwriting on TVamp8217s wallThe distance between Traceyamp8217s Valhalla and where we have now gotten to in May of 2015 may not be so far apart At TiVo Research a method has been invented by which any number of parties may keep their own data behind their own firewalls and yet those disparate data piles can be perfectly aligned in aggregate to provide larger scale reports Under certain conditions of business deal everyone can get what they wantThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Media Village management or associated bloggers Image at top courtesy of freedigitalphotosnetamp160amp160

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A Big Step for Set Top Box Data

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Bill Harvey

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