SAN FRANCISCO, CA — TV advertisers are going to need to leverage their own customer data sets in the coming era of advanced TV ad targeting – because the recent age of indiscriminate targeting is being nixed amid a flight to privacy.

That is according to one executive who thinks advertisers need to use more precise measurement than TV’s traditional panels, even though they will be challenged by new regulation.

“Let’s replace the legacy panel,” says Ashwin Navin CEO of ad-tech company Samba TV”, which may have worked in the 1950s, with a much larger panel that’s much more representative of how video is being consumed at large, not from one particular TV manufacturer, or one particular device, but from a diversity of devices, where you can get a much more representative picture of the picture that exists.

“The data that exists outside the television is quite robust. The models that we enjoy in digital media are pretty sophisticated. That rigor needs to be replicated in the television.”

San Francisco-based Samba was set up to help advertisers and broadcasters know, with certainty, which TV shows viewers were watching, for how long and how attentive they were.

Launched in 2008 and backed by investors including Mark Cuban, the outfit works by having software embedded on millions of viewing devices via app makers which bundle Samba’s recommendation features.

Its dataset is collected from now over 20 different television brands globally, from over 25 million opted-in households, including 10 different manufacturers in the US.

“I think our industry is completely flatfooted in the way we approach datasets,” Navin continues. “We put consumers at the end of the consideration, and we need to start putting the consumer at the beginning of any conversation that involves data

“It’s best to just work with first parties. Anything less than that in the absence of a more sort of transparent regulatory framework is putting big businesses at risk.”

The interview was carried out by Beet.TV director of editorial and strategy Jon Watts.

This video is part of  Beet.TV’s coverage  of  RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco.  This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.