Ad Tech Got Serious About Addressable Inventory This Week

One of the biggest announcements came courtesy of NCC Media, which revealed its rebrand to Ampersand, along with a slew of new tech for those in the TV market. Per Ampersand, the new company will pool viewership data gleaned from its cable company’s set-top boxes, giving media buyers a one-stop shop to target their desired audience. It also unveiled new products to help network execs better mesh and measure audiences between their linear and connected inventories.

This is the latest move for the Ampersand—which is a joint effort between cable operators Comcast, Charter and Cox—as a major player in the industry’s slow lurch toward addressable inventory, after joining the broadcaster-led OpenAp 2.0 initiative earlier this year. Per the company, advertisers will be able to use the audience definitions designated by the OpenAP consortium when buying inventory through these systems.

Ampersand wasn’t the only company rolling out new audience-first offerings this week. The Goldman Sachs-backed ad-tech powerhouse Innovid announced a partnership with Roku to measure commercial campaigns delivered in-app and through linear means. The solution is meant to marry identity data from Roku’s 30.5 million accounts with the roughly 75 million households Innovid serves through its OTT platform.

Meanwhile, Telaria—a supply-side outfit that was named Hulu’s partner of record earlier this year—introduced its Addressable Connect program meant to bring more addressability to advertisers through three newly created data sets.

The first, Audience Connect, links up advertisers to audiences via first- and third-party data gleaned from Telaria’s publisher partners, while Contextual Connect allows them to reach audiences using metrics like device IDs and show genres. The last data set, Performance Connect, allows advertisers to buy for their campaign goals like viewability, completion rate or a desired CPM.

“The industry has limited ‘addressable’ to mean only household-level targeting on television,” said Laura Buchman, Telaria’s vice president of addressable and audience strategy, in a statement. “But we believe CTV is inherently addressable and can go beyond basic household-level data and holistically optimize audience, contextual and behavioral criteria to drive campaign performance.”