As part of our partnership with the TV Data Initiative, we’re going to be showcasing video interviews with various consortium members where they will discuss the key issues surrounding the TV data ecosystem and the what they hope the consortium can accomplish

Here, Tru Optik, a TransUnion Company’s Chief Strategist, David Wiesenfeld talks about the importance of cooperating to create some form of best practices for the way TV data is used and why greater cooperation is really the best way to attract greater investment from advertisers.

DAVID WIESENFELD: I think one of the biggest barriers to this is really the legacy systems and practices and sort of rivalries, if you will, that exist, in the system. So we often look at this and we think, in a way, if we could get everybody—we’re not talking about standardization or doing things one way similar to one set of, let’s say, identifiers just to pick on that. 

But if you can get cooperation in the ecosystem, everybody benefits.

If you look at all the services, things have been done about why the amount of money in the advanced TV ecosystem lags the viewership time for streaming and linear addressable and other forms of targetable TV. 

It’s the difficulty of stitching these different buys together in a way that is coordinated and consistent.

And the only way that’s ever going to really occur is that the industry gets together and says, look, we’re going to get on board with a couple of different ways of doing this.

We’re going to align in kind of an open sense with one or two or three or four different companies that are sort of neutral providers of an identity solution.

We’re all going sync with those and we’re going to allow our inventory to be available, not necessarily programmatically, but at least on a on an equivalent basis, or at least on a on an equivalent basis so that a buyer can go into that system and see what’s available, pick targeting information that they want to use and apply across that system in a consistent way so that they can get the kinds of audience targeting and control that they need to have to execute their campaigns.

And until that happens, I think we’re going to be in a situation like where we are now, with a lot of fragmentation and complexity that is inhibiting dollars from flowing into the system.