Dive Brief:
- Dentsu and VideoAmp today (Oct. 12) announced an activation that enables Dentsu's U.S. media agencies to seamlessly guarantee audience buys across seven major media portfolios for a single advertiser, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
- The partnership combines Dentsu's Data Enabled Linear TV Activation (DELTA) platform and VideoAmp's big dataset transacts and guarantees audiences across Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, A+E Networks, Hallmark Media and NBCU, among others.
- The offering, which press materials refer to as an industry-first capability, provides advertisers a unified solution for planning and measurement and is a major step for VideoAmp as it continues to establish itself as an alternative currency to legacy currencies like Nielsen.
Dive Insight:
Dentsu and VideoAmp, in a deepening of an existing partnership, demonstrate how agencies and ad tech companies are working together to develop alternative currencies and deliver on the promise of advanced audiences and big data at scale. Dentsu already has a number of clients testing the solution, but further details are not publicly available, per a Dentsu spokesperson.
The new solution allows advertisers to guarantee a campaign across major publishers and long tail content providers such as A+E and Hallmark. Previously, agencies have leveraged VideoAmp's currency on a one-to-one basis, guaranteeing a campaign for a single publisher. The across-the-board approach should help advertisers drive better outcomes and higher return on ad spend.
“As we look to the future of seamless video investment for our clients, this innovative partnership represents a positive shift in the marketplace, enabling advertisers to more effectively reach more valuable audiences in premium placements,” said Brad Stockton, senior vice president of video innovation at Dentsu, in a statement.
The offering uses Dentsu's DELTA platform, allowing advertisers to tap into the agency's Merkury ecosystem that they currently use to plan and optimize campaigns. The platform leverages VideoAmp to unite planning and measurement and provide currency-grade data and insights, optimizing media spend and helping advertisers more effectively reach target audiences.
The race to establish a multicurrency marketplace has heated up as of late. VideoAmp last month joined Comscore and iSpot as currencies that received conditional certification by the U.S. Joint Industry Committee. ISpot, which recently received Media Rating Council accreditation for its ad catalog, this week joined VideoAmp and Comscore as alternative currency options utilized by Paramount Global.
Despite these gains by alternative currency providers, the measurement landscape is still volatile. While VideoAmp recently secured $150 million in Series G funding, the company also laid off about 10% of its workforce — a move echoing the percentage of layoffs that Nielsen undertook around the same time.
