Roku's new tool measures incremental reach across OTT, TV ads

Dive Brief:

Set top box company Roku and video marketing platform Innovid, which have been working together since 2015, launched a new marketing analytics tool that allows brands to track the daily demographic reach and frequency for ads across over-the-top and linear TV, according to a press release shared with Marketing Dive.
The tool taps into the identities of Roku's 30.5 million active accounts and merges those insights with Innovid's OTT ad serving data on 75 million households. By partnering on these data points, the companies intend to reveal new measurement options to marketers so they can better optimize their ad buys from Roku and other publishers without having to add additional tagging or integrations and with an eye toward avoiding serving the same ad too many times to the same viewer.
Verizon is in the alpha program for the tool, which is being tested by several Innovid and Roku clients. The expectation is that it will broaden its reach beyond the Roku platform to all of OTT.

Dive Insight:

Over-the-top streaming and connected TVs have transformed how audiences view television, with consumers increasingly watching programming across both linear and OTT platforms. As brands scale their OTT ad buys, one potential danger is wasting their ad dollars by serving the same ad to one viewer repeatedly, a challenge the new Roku and Innovid tool hopes to address.

"The ability to manage daily incremental reach and frequency across OTT and Linear TV is very much needed as we continue to scale spend in OTT and will help give us more confidence to know our clients' investment in OTT is driving measurable results," said Mike Law, president at Dentsu's Amplifi, in a statement.

OTT ad spend is expected to see 39% growth to $3.8 billion in 2019 and 31% growth to $5 billion by 2020, according to Magna's forecasts. As advertisers put their money into these platforms, they are looking to merge the benefits of reach with the data of digital.

The new tool reflects Roku's latest push to expand analytics and targeting tools to pinpoint audiences not reached with TV ads on its over-the-top TV platform. In May, the company released Activation Insights, which allows a advertiser to compare its linear TV campaign performance with the potential OTT audience to set budgets.

Innovid continues to expand its offerings, as the company announced earlier this month that it had acquired the display advertising software company Herolens, bringing brands better omnichannel solutions to more easily track consumer behavior.