Xfinity, Comcast, FreeWheel, and Beeswax Deliver a Transformational Advertising Technology
Connecting the dots between linear TV, CTV, and internal and external identity sources and signals powers a next-generation TV advertising platform.
In our webinar, Demystifying Viewership Data With Beeswax, Xander Kotsatos and Moe Ismail break down what a newly launched integrated system, the result of FreeWheel’s acquisition of Beeswax, means for advertisers, brands, and agencies.
To understand this new TV advertising model, it’s important to understand the difference between ACR (automated content recognition) systems and deterministic data.
Overview of Seed Data Sources
1
Automatic Content Recognition (ACR)
A modeled approach that is used to identify what is playing on a TV based on sampling the audio and video layers
2
Deterministic Data
First-party data that is known to be true based on the programming schedule and delivery of streaming signals
Smart TV manufacturers and OTT technology providers monetize their products by providing solutions that categorize streaming content. Using a quasi-automated stack, samples of programming are taken (screen grabs and audio clips) and tagged. Then streaming programming is compared to samples using automation to categorize streaming content at scale.
The advantage of this approach is a pretty good guess at a relatively low cost. This approach has tradeoffs, however. It relies on modeling to build audiences at scale. A household might have multiple devices from different manufacturers, leading to difficulty covering a household. Also, different smart TV brands themselves attract different demographics, with a premium brand gathering a different audience than a discount brand. This approach also struggles with programming such as live events and first-time shows, as there is no baseline data to compare this content to.
In the end, you’re only going to get what that provider thinks it knows and your audience only covers smart TVs, not traditional linear TVs. It’s hard to execute a media buy across platforms to manage your reach and frequency at a household level.
Buying TV advertising through FreeWheel’s Beeswax platform, you get a one-of-a-kind solution that delivers deterministic TV audience targeting.
Being a linear TV provider, we have access to the actual programming schedule, versus a guess based upon whatever the TV manufacturer happens to be.
