SAN JOSE, Calif. & NEW YORK—Roku and Nielsen are partnering up to boost addressable advertising and cross-media measurement as a result of Roku’s purchase of Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business.
The AVA business consists of Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies. Roku says that the acquisition will accelerate its planned launch of an end-to-end DAI solution with linear TV programmers, a process that it already has on its streaming platform.
“Combining Nielsen’s AVA technology with Roku’s innovative ad tech and scale will enable us to deliver the benefits of TV streaming advertising to traditional TV,” said Louqman Parampth, vice president of Product Management at Roku. “Roku will bring the promise of DAI to the market for the first time ever at scale—providing better targeting and measurement for advertisers, creating easy integration and additional revenue opportunities for programmers’ ad sales teams, and improving the TV experience for viewers.”
Nielsen has already tested its own DAI system with the likes of AMC Networks, CBS, Discovery, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia, according to TV Tech’s sister publication Next|TV.
As part of the deal, Roku and Nielsen will enter into a long-term commercial agreement to leverage Total Ad Ratings (TAR) on the Roku platform. This includes Roku’s OneView ad-buying platform, which will natively integrate with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings for advertisers. Roku will also enable publishers to implement Nielsen Digital Content Ratings. In addition, Roku will help further advance Nielsen One, Nielsen’s cross-media measurement scheme.
“The measurement of ads and content on Roku devices will accelerate the path to a single, deduplicated cross-media currency,” Scott N. Brown, general manager, Audience Measurement, Nielsen. “As Roku brings the power of dynamic ad insertion to all forms of TV, we’re excited to help monetize the addressable market by measuring smart TV as a currency, which Nielsen can do at scale.”
No financial details of the deal were disclosed. Roku said in its announcement that it expects the deal to close in the second quarter of 2021.
At the closing of the deal, Roku will take on Nielsen AVA employees and ownership of ACR and DAI patents.
