This Innovator Spotlight is from our new report, FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising, which is available as a free download for a limited time only.

“We're very sensitive to viewers' privacy, it is absolutely front and center to everything we do at VIZIO Ads,” states Travis Hockersmith, Group Vice President, Platform+ at VIZIO Ads. “We know, for example, if they have explicitly opted in to ACR detection We know what they've watched with, but we don't collect any PII or Personally Identifiable Information on those users, or pass that information in any way that would violate the privacy that our viewers expect.”

ALAN WOLK: What are some other ways you are working to handle viewer privacy issues?

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH: Everything we do is anonymized to safeguard PII. We're aggregating data across the board as much as possible, so that we're not identifying any one particular individual on anything other than the viewership trends that have hit the glass of that particular household. 

When we're using third party data, we vet the privacy policies of those third party data providers very closely. 

ALAN WOLK: What are the advantages of working with a company like VIZIO that owns both the hardware and the software?

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH: I think working with an OEM is the best path to achieving scale within the CTV space. It's the combination of the inventory and the data that the OEM can bring to the table. That's so powerful for advertisers.

Most of our advertisers are spending via their TV budgets. And they're trying to achieve incremental reach or manage frequency across both their CTV buy and their linear buy 

By taking advantage of the ACR data we have on the platform and the wide footprint that we have on inventory, we're able to do that deterministically. 

If you're working with only a content provider or only a data provider, you don't get that full picture. I think working with VIZIO, because we’re an OEM, you get both the data and the inventory working together in a way that helps the advertiser to best achieve their goals.

ALAN WOLK: Why does frequency capping continue to be such a problem for CTV?

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH: Frequency capping is a huge issue in the CTV space. We've all seen the repetitive ad issues in some apps. 

We have a couple of different ways that we approach it at VIZIO ads, all of which go back to the data and the inventory being married together.

The first thing we can do is respect what we call a universal frequency cap, where we can count the number of times the ad hits the glass, independent of input. 

Once that particular TV has hit the cap, we can stop delivery of that particular creative unit on the VIZIO ads portion of the buy. 

Another tactic we take is to target TVs based on what ads they have seen or not seen. So we can drive what we call true incremental reach by deterministically delivering ads only to TVs where we've never recognized that same ad via our ACR technology. 

ALAN WOLK: Let’s talk about your own data set, from Inscape. What advantages does that give you if I am an advertiser?

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH: Our ACR data allows us to have a complete picture of what's happening on the screen, independent of input. So whether a viewer is watching a specific piece of content via cable box, via an app or on our platform, we're detecting it at the glass level. That's one key advantage over other approaches to measuring TV viewership, in that it doesn't matter what input the content is coming in from, because we are seeing where content is being viewed. 

This data allows us to create comprehensive reach and frequency strategies to make sure that we're reaching the right viewers, the right number of times, which can be a real challenge in the CTV space.

So it helps that we have over 20 million devices that we're collecting this data from. And of course that footprint goes far beyond any individual panel, which helps create that very accurate view of what's happening at the household level. We can then merge that household level data with third party demographic data to inform household composition. So we believe that fundamentally, you've got to collect data at the glass level in order to really understand what's happening within a household.

ALAN WOLK  Switching gears, what is your take on contextual advertising, whose popularity seems to be growing on streaming. 

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH: There's an expectation among advertisers that their ad is not only going to be targeted but contextually relevant. That's long been the way that TV advertising has worked. And we can see that ad performance tends to be higher, where there is contextual alignment. 

We can help achieve this through our ACR data. We can target people based on not only what they're currently watching, but what they have watched in the past, whether they've seen a specific ad or not seen the ad, whether they watch a particular type of content, or don't watch a specific type of content. And we have the capacity to target them all based on those characteristics. 

We can also align those buys with genre within our owned and operated service WatchFree+. 

And it works.

When we look at  performance data, we can see that when there is strong contextual alignment, ads do tend to work better. So it's going to continue to be important to TV advertisers to find that alignment.

ALAN WOLK: Streaming is often sold as a great way to reach specific audiences. But what do you say to advertisers who want to reach as many people as possible with a message that is just about brand image? 

TRAVIS HOCKERSMITH:  We have a variety of advertisers who are looking at brand health metrics as their primary metrics for a campaign. And we have a lot of ways that we can measure that, tactics like brand lift surveys. 

We also have some advertisers who already have a lot of good data on how well their ads work at certain reach and frequency levels. And what we can do for them is help them achieve those reach and frequency levels in a way that consumers don’t get oversaturated with the ad, but at the same time helping them viewers who say have been under-exposed to the ad. So depending on the KPIs on those campaigns, we have a lot of good solutions, and a lot of good data that will help us guide those solutions.