How VIZIO’s ACR Data Is Powering TV’s New Currencies
This interview is an excerpt from TVREV’s new report Getting Granular: How ACR Data Is Winning The TV Measurement Game. Download your copy today to read the full report.
“If there’s one thing that sets our ACR data apart from everyone else’s, it’s that it is powering the future of TV measurement currency. We are the ACR data currency for the marketplace,” notes Ken Norcross, Senior Director of Data Strategy at VIZIO. “We collect data from over 19 million opted-in smart TVs. People leverage it for everything from ad measurement to attribution to calculating incremental reach. I don’t think it’s bragging to say that we really created the market for ACR data.”
ALAN WOLK (AW): Can you explain how ACR data collection actually works?
KEN NORCROSS (KN): I like using the analogy of Shazam. Most people know Shazam and have used it. But at its core, ACR is very similar to Shazam, where you tap the screen so you can figure out what song is playing. Shazam listens to a few seconds of the song and then calibrates against a content index that it has, and it can instantly tell you what song you are listening to.
On the Inscape side, we do something very similar. But instead of listening, we're actually looking at what's on the screen of the TV. Our ACR technology looks at specific spots on the TV, and compares those to a known content index of programming as well as ads. So within a few seconds, we can see whether the fingerprints coming from the TV match something in our content index and create a known fingerprint at that point.
AW: Tell me more about these content databases. Do you create them or is there a universal list that’s available to everyone?
KN: We actually create these ourselves. We leverage national and local linear ingest feeds to create fingerprints and then attach content metadata at the point that we're ingesting. That creates the base of our content index from a linear standpoint.
AW: What is unique about VIZIO and its ACR products?
KN: What's unique about us is that we're owned by VIZIO, which is the hardware that our ACR is embedded in. So we have access to a lot more information outside of just what our ACR can collect. We can see all the devices that are connected to the TV, plus what's happening on the Smartcast operating system. We have over 19 million TVs that are opted in today and that lets us use our ACR technology to detect second by second viewing across all of those TVs. We have a lightweight scalable client that allows us to do that and see the content and ad exposure behavior happening on the glass of the TV.
AW:How are other companies, third parties, using Incape’s ACR data?
KN: Most of the companies that make use of our data use it primarily for analytics and measurement. We just announced Videoamp, where we'll be supporting their currency initiative on the sell side as well as the buy side. We work with partners like iSpot TV, who primarily use our data to do ad measurement. They can link ad exposure from our TV feed across linear TV to any digital tactic to compile attribution metrics.
One of the most common use cases is tune in. We have the content feed and the promos for specific shows. It allows programmers to easily understand how effective their campaign was at driving eyeballs to the show.
AW: Let’s zero in on attribution. Why is that such a big use case for ACR?
KN: ACR gives you a connection point between all of your media tactics, because you can use either an IP address directly, or you can use a match partner like a Liveramp or Experian that will allow you to tie together all facets of the campaign. So the granularity and the scale of the data as well as the ability to match it to other pieces of information that either can be first party or third party creates a unique value proposition on the attribution side. That is unique for ACR data and specifically for us.
AW: What’s new at Inscape? Are there any new products you are working on?
KN: We recently launched a client-facing dashboard for our data to allow people to actually play around with the data and get some more insight and really dictate what they are receiving in a light custom way. So depending on which metrics they're looking to provide, they can make use of this ratings reporting system that we’ve created.
Better still, we can enable folks to actually do this on their own, to be able to use the system to get access to the data outside of just the raw output. We think that sort of self-serve measurement is going to become very popular.
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