1. VIZIO, Comscore And The Value Of Cooperation

Last week I outlined why the lack of cooperation among all of the many players in the TV ecosystem was all but assuring Google, Meta and Amazon’s victory. It was a message that resonated with many people, as witnessed by the many messages and in-person affirmations we got.

But being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I wanted to point out an example of what that sort of cooperation actually looks like.

VIZIO’s Inscape unit uses ACR to collect data from over 24 million (opted-in) VIZIO TVs. They then share this data with a number of different vendors, including Comscore. It’s an arrangement they’ve had since 2018, which is why it’s worth applauding the fact that they have chosen to renew and expand the agreement this week.

Why It Matters

By many measures, streaming measurement has come a long way since 2018. And by many others it has not.

Which is why everyone else needs to hang together.

To wit: Comscore is looking to support a patent-pending technique they have developed to prevent overcounting when viewers are “multitasking”—meaning viewers who are either watching the same show across different devices (say, starting on their living room TV and then switching to mobile) or households where viewers are watching TV on more than one device simultaneously (kids in the basement, parents in the den).

And what sort of data does Comscore use in order to monitor this and create deduplicated measurement stats? ACR (automatic content recognition) data from Inscape.

Inscape, which recently expanded its coverage of local TV stations by directly accessing tuners in smart TVs across every local TV market, is able to supply Comscore with the level of granularity they need to provide those deduplicated numbers across 210 different DMAs. Local viewing is often markedly different from national viewing, and so having greater granularity thanks to Inscape’s improved local data is a big plus.

That, in turn, helps Comscore to compete against not just Nielsen, but other rivals in the measurement space… many of whom also use Inscape data to secure their own unique advantage.

The various measurement players all offer something slightly different, some combination of data points that advertisers find both useful and unique enough to consider paying for.

In Comscore’s case, it’s the aforementioned deduplication, among other things. 

The lesson here though, is not so much that there are multiple viable rivals to Nielsen (you knew that), or that some of them are better positioned than others, with MRC and JIC certification (you knew that too), but rather, that the reason there are multiple viable rivals is that at some level the various players are all actually cooperating with each other on the assumption that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Something for the rest of the industry to think about.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are one of the many players in the TV industry who is not doing a very good job of cooperating with your rivals, if you’re reinventing the wheel by creating your own proprietary technologies for things that, by dint of being limited to your footprint, will never have scale, please stop.

You are not doing anyone any favors, yourselves included. All you are doing is helping Google, Amazon and Meta. 

Advertisers are not impressed that you’ve done this. Neither are shareholders. 

So again, just stop and channel all the energy into something more productive.

If you’re one of the people who told me you liked the cooperation message, especially after hearing me deliver a stump speech about it during a certain high-power dinner Monday night—thank you. I eat that stuff up. But now I need you to go put it into practice and push back against all the forces who are pulling in the other direction. 

And there’s no time like the present.

2. SMB-TV At Advertising Week

For this one, I’m going to bring back a story I told almost a year ago.

Remember how, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, there were all these virtue signalers calling on big companies to boycott Facebook. Only once many of said big companies complied, it turned out that there was really no point in boycotting Meta, since the majority of their client base consisted of small and medium businesses (SMBs) who really had no other options now that the Yellow Pages were dead.

Well a lot of people filed that away, thinking to themselves that at some point, the TV industry, which has always had a lot of small local advertisers (at least at 3 AM), could learn/steal a thing or two from Zuckerland.

And now they’re putting that plan into action.

Why It Matters

The reason Meta was able to sign up all those SMBs was that it provided an easy way for them to create their own ad campaigns, everything from who the target was, to what the creative looked like.

That last part is key: by creating the ads automatically, Meta was able to put control into the hands of the client who no longer needed to pay an ad agency to create ads for them.

This was an even bigger issue on TV, given that in days of yore, even the most basic TV commercials could easily cost well over $10,000—with big brand budgets laying out $20 million or more for a new campaign.

But thanks to AI, this is no longer a problem: SMBs can type in a description of what they want and a well-trained LLM (large language model) can scrape their website and spit out a serviceable TV commercial. That, or it can take their latest social media post and turn it into a TV spot.

Which is why we are now seeing a host of start-ups circling around the space, offering everything from media placement to creative production to shoppability and interactivity.

Their goal is to peel a good chunk of the market away from Meta, something we feel they will not have much difficulty doing: SMB owners are well aware that Facebook usage is way down, to the point where people are sometimes embarrassed to admit they’re still on the platform. (Seriously, when was the last time you sent someone a Friend request?)

So there’s that and there’s the impending public launch of Sora, the video creation program from ChatGPT that will allow all those AI-generated commercials to move way beyond Ken Burns effect. 

Take a look at this Sora-created demo ToysRUs spot if you don’t believe me.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are a VC, you need to do your research and put your money into one of these new SMB-on-CTV focused companies. Vibe.co is getting lots of buzz right now, but there are others out there.

If you are a local broadcaster, this could be a goldmine for you. You need to get ahead of it, make it something you offer, provide value for both the tech vendors and the advertisers.

Ditto station groups, broadcast and cable networks, SVODs and FASTs.

If you were at AWNY and missed this anyway because you were on line for the Netflix demo, well, now you know. 

And if you are Meta, be afraid.

Be very afraid. 

(And then figure out how to move your massive customer base onto CTV before you go the way of AOL and MySpace.)

You’re welcome.