SAN JUAN, PR – Advertisers will soon put their own data about customers and prospects to better work in the art of TV targeting.

Samsung Ads, the unit of the Korean hardware giant that helps advertisers leverage real audience viewing data, straight off the TV itself, to target ads, says it will soon be digging farther in to “first-party”.

“I think you’ll start to see us be a little bit more focused and intentional about working directly with clients on their data,” says Michael Scott, Samsung Ads’ head of brand sales in North America.

“Certainly we love our third-party partners, but nothing beats a first-party data match between our viewership data and their key files that they might have.”

Launched back in 2015 as “Samsung Smart TV Advertising”, Samsung Ads, a unit inside the giant Korean electronics manufacturer, tracks what audiences are watching on Samsung Smart TV screens, in order to provide targeting data to marketers.

The business unit is able to understand actual viewing, whether it be linear or OTT, by running automated content recognition (ACR) on Samsung Smart TVs, to identify content that is actually being consumed.

Now it claims to have 60% of the consumers visible via industry-deployed ACR technology, whether they ware watching live TV, VOD or playing a console game – in all, around 220 million connected devices, 45 million TVs in 38 million US homes.

Samsung launched its own Samsung TV Plus, its own gateway to over-IP TV services on its smart TV sets, which now numbers more than 90 free channels

Scott says: “We’re able to tell everything that’s happening on the glass, whether it’s in an ad supported environment or not ad supported environment.

“We’re also able to tell through some of those ports what type of internet service you might have, what type of gaming console you might have, even down the language settings. So we’re able to kind of understand Hispanic homes or in the case of our Canadian business, French language homes.”

Scott was interviewed by TV[R]EV co-founder Alan Wolk at Beet Retreat San Juan 2020, where he was a participant.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.   For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page