SANTA MONICA, CA — It seemed like such a lightbulb moment, the idea that measuring actual connected TV consumption could improve the measurement of TV ads to such a personal degree.

Unfortunately, “household identity graphs” don’t necessarily solve the intrinsic problem that TV sets often enable communal viewing.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Field Garthwaite, Co-Founder & CEO, IRIS.TV, says he has a better solution.

Co-viewing’s hidden results

“Household IDs, which is a really common identifier for targeting audiences, typically are tied to five different people at a time,” Garthwaite says.

“The fact that you’re seeing so many people do co-viewing and you don’t know who you’re going to reach, it kind of raises the importance of the environment and the relevance and kind of the content.”

Of course, once upon a time, traditional media always sold ads on the simply adjacency to content.

But the new science of digital content has an upgraded offering.

Deep video understanding

Garthwaite calls it “content identifiers”.

IRIS.TV’s technology peers into video content to produce a range of buyable “contextual” targeting cues, to make programming descriptors like ratings, genres and celebrities in-show classifications actionable.

“We’ve announced major players like Univision and there’s many more coming up who are starting to use content IDs on every video, every TV show, every movie,” Garthwaite says.

“Then they can ensure that, on every screen, every device and every measurement provider, they’ll have a consistent content ID that they can use to understand how their ads are performing.”

Brands need moments

Garthwaite says IRIS.TV is working with “all the leading ad servers to make this possible”, including Springserve, Publica, Amazon, Comcast FreeWheel and Google.

He says it’s about, for example, American Express needing to know it’s impacting against travel content, or Toyota in sports environments or IBM placing in tennis – not only at the level of the entire show, but also of individual scenes and moemnts.

“Because they made huge investments,” he says. “With video-level data, you can actually now ensure that brand placements are adjacent to and shown at the exact moment that the consumer is engaged in relevant content.”

You are watching coverage of Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2022, presented by Ampersand, MiQ, Nielsen, PubMatic, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and The Trade Desk. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page. 

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews