If you want audiences to recognize your brand, TV is where you want to be. But the pipes that deliver TV content to consumers are evolving. While time spent watching linear TV declined last year, time spent watching digital increased 25%. TV isn’t dying, it’s changing.
Streaming TV is regarded by many industry insiders as the holy grail. It combines the precision of digital with the brand-building power of TV. It allows advertisers to really understand how their campaign performed. Buyers can match footfall data back to campaign impressions, assess how many people visited a website after watching an ad, and much more.
But it’s harder than it looks. Consumers are watching more TV than ever, but information about how and where they watch isn’t centralized in one place. Behavior is fragmented across many devices and channels, and unlike in linear, there is no widely adopted currency for digital TV measurement.
There’s massive technical overhead involved if you want to consolidate the data you need to accurately forecast delivery of streaming TV campaigns. To run a successful campaign, you don’t just need to know who you’re going to reach, you also need to know where to reach them. And if you want to be able to act on what you know, you need that data to update fast.
We built our forecaster to overcome all these challenges. Since we are full-stack (buy-side & sell-side), we have access to the entire bidstream, including through direct partnerships with leading publishers. We were one of the first platforms designed specifically for OTT, so we’ve been ingesting billions of signals from millions of devices for several years — and we update them in truly real time.
Many DSPs struggle to provide accurate forecasting tools. While they have access to all ad opportunities — not just those that become impressions — many DSPs are new to OTT and CTV. They don’t have the benefit of years worth of data to help them successfully predict avails. Adding to this problem, the majority of DSPs don’t store the entire bid stream. Because ingesting the billions of signals that flood in from the bid stream is a massive technical challenge, many ingest one of every ten or twenty that come in. Every ad request that is not ingested and catalogued is a missed opportunity to make a more accurate forecasting tool.
Measurement companies have their own unique challenges when it comes to building accurate forecasting tools. They only have access to the campaign data their customers give them, making their forecasts biased due to small sample sizes of data. They also only see ad opportunities that their customers bid on and won. They miss out on the billions of opportunities that did not ultimately become impressions.
Finally, any company looking to make an accurate forecaster must figure out the complex data science required to ingest, organize, and analyze billions of signals each second and make that available to customers instantly. Here’s why that’s important.
Real time insights are critical to beating your competitors to the punch. Since our data ingests more signals and updates up to 72 hours sooner than competitor solutions, you have the opportunity to beat your competitors to the bid. Your ad plays while your competitor is still searching for an old IP address or mobile ID. Buyers who use our forecaster can also see economic efficiencies, since speed also means that in many cases we are able to opportunistically acquire media at a lower price. This combination of underlying infrastructure gives buyers and sellers who use our forecaster unique transparency and a truly representative preview of the OTT universe.
Our commitment to transparency is integral to everything we build at MadHive. From cryptographic signatures to accurate audience forecasts, we rely on continuous updates to provide the data we need to optimize each campaign. It’s not enough to update periodically. When it comes to identity resolution, fraud prevention, frequency capping, and precision targeting, real-time is the only way.
