Nielsen's Game-Changing Innovation, Tech, and Data on Display at CES 2020

At a large and elegant demo area within CES39s adfocused CSpace Nielsen demonstrated an early release of its addressable TV solution powered by multiple acquisitions over the past few years This solution could help to unlock one of the most frustrating barriers marketers have run into in the more than 15 years of addressable advertising the ability to use national TV inventory at scaleThe first step for Nielsen in the era of transparency and consumer privacy was the acquisition of Qterics a company that developed a solution for managing consumer privacy and consent as well as remote software management The system is jurisdiction aware and provides consumers with an easy method to opt out of data collection for purposes such as being tracked for segmented advertising to their householdAnother key development was Nielsen39s acquisition of Gracenote in 2017 which brought industryleading automatic content recognition ACR technology into its portfolio Gracenote39s advanced ACR capabilities power dynamic ad detection and enable seamless ad replacement within linear broadcast TV programmingThen in early 2019 Nielsen acquired Sorenson Media Sorenson was an early innovator in the addressable TV space and offered a wealth of knowledge in inventory and yield management identity and targeting ad decisioning and campaign management These capabilities combined with Gracenote39s ACR and Qterics39 consent management platform enable Nielsen to move faster on its promise to deliver national linear addressable advertising to the media industryNielsen is taking a methodical approach to the buildout and rollout of all this technology This approach includes robust workflow analysis to understand how programmers prefer to manage their inventory and yield and how they want to make inventory available to the market Nielsen39s advanced inventory and yield management capabilities combined with an advanced ad decisioning system enables programmers to avoid the quotanalog dollars to digital dimesquot challenge and specify at what floor price CPM they are willing to allow a linear ad unit to be placed in the available pool of inventory for addressableThe rollout of Nielsen39s solution will take place in a controlled series of steps in lockstep with the programmers The first step currently in progress is running several beta tests of the addressable technology by seven leading US programmers AE AMC CBS Discovery FOX NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia These media companies will evaluate how Nielsen39s open technology interoperates with their existing and evolving workflows Those TV networks will have the chance to review and experiment with the solution39s full capabilities including inventory and campaign management audience targeting ad decisioning dynamic ad replacement and C3C7 measurement reconciliationOnce the programmers involved are satisfied that the solution is ready to be deployed into consumer homes Nielsen will go into Beta phase two which involves an infield rollout of the technology to thousands of devices and the solution being tested endtoend together with the programmers as well as selected agencies and brands quotIt39s all about the participants being happy about how the technology is working They have existing workflows and need to be comfortable that the Nielsen solution fits into their desired way of workingquot said Brian Jentz senior vice president advanced video advertising at NielsenThe integration of these elements into a working and functional tech stack is a solid step forward for addressable TV However there remains a larger question as to just how much national linear inventory programmers are willing to make available for addressable TV outside of copy splitting for fullunit buys With a shrinking pool of premium television impressions it39s unlikely that tentpole events involving major sponsorships will be top of the inventory available listNonetheless the ability that Nielsen39s Advanced Video Advertising brings to manage inventory yield and give marketers ranging from TV to digital buyers the ability to target their advertising is significant and noteworthy progress when coupled with OTT and other digital media targetingLastly Nielsen will leverage its knowledge and expertise in TV measurement to measure addressable advertising across both smart TVs and MVPD providers in a way that39s transparent and protects the integrity of the current C3C7 currency standards By adjusting the currency to account for linear addressable TV ads Nielsen will truly help the industry unlock addressable TV inventory at scaleIt is important to note that the Nielsen solution for advanced linear addressable will only work on a connected smart TV According to the Consumer Tech Association over 144 million smart TVs have been sold in the United States Research from Parks Associates shows that approximately 77 percent of those sets are actually connectedWith all the tech pieces and a core team of experienced professionals passionate about the advanced TV space in place and poised for success it appears that the industry has hit a significant milestone With the opening of national linear inventory all parties acting in good faith as partners amp8212 including Nielsen agencies and marketers amp8212 will give the advanced TV industry a strong push forwardStriking a Chord With MetadataDuring our time with Nielsen we also learned how Gracenote39s video metadata business is providing an innovative solution for the growing problem of content discovery in the era of peak video This is made more complex with the explosion of streaming services and the overall fragmentation of consumer viewing platformsGracenote39s core expertise has always been in entertainment metadata essentially deep descriptive information about content that serves as the fuel for nextgeneration navigation search and discovery Today Gracenote focuses on three entertainment verticals video music and sportsThe breadth and depth of Gracenote39s video metatags go beyond cast information character names directors episode descriptions and images they also include deep descriptions of content themes moods and scenarios such as quothighly intense actionquot or quotdeeply emotionalquot Today Gracenote has data and imagery for tens of millions of video programs covering 85 countries and 35 languagesGracenote descriptive metadata coupled with popularity metrics such as boxoffice return number of awards or social noise are driving nextgeneration content recommendation capabilities that improve on collaborative filtering and the quotwatch this because you watched thatquot approach Now coupled with viewers39 motivations and intentions as well as their unique taste profiles Gracenote is helping to power truly personalized viewing experiencesquotWe sit at the center of the maelstrom to help people sort and provide clarity around what39s going on in content discoveryquot explained Simon Adams chief product officer of Gracenote a Nielsen company quotThe core thing now is not just the breadth of the data that we have but also being much more granular on how we identify a piece of contentquotDon39t stop now Stay in the know with more from NielsenDataInSitesClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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Nielsen's Game-Changing Innovation, Tech, and Data on Display at CES 2020

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Jeff Minsky

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Nielsen's Game-Changing Innovation, Tech, and Data on Display at CES 2020

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