The TV Commercial, Once Advertising’s Main Event, Suffers in the Pandemic
The New York Times, 5/28/2020
The home improvement retailer spent more than $1 million to promote a Memorial Day discount on washer-dryer sets last year, according to the ad measurement company iSpot.TV, releasing an elaborate commercial with multiple actors in multiple locations. This year, the company used a 15-second commercial — a bare-bones production set in a utility room — for its summertime kickoff promotion.
Disney+, Hulu Among Streamers Upping TV Ads During Pandemic
Adweek, 5/28/2020
Those services’ investment in TV advertising, etc measured by the television advertising measurement firm iSpot.TV, came as most Americans considerably increased their TV time, and it suggests that some streamers are looking to capitalize on time spent at home by getting in front of homebound Americans. The data shows a bump in both estimated spend and media value to account for advertisements that may have run as promotions or at discounted rates on companies’ owned networks.
Neustar and iSpot.tv Partner to Connect Digital and Television Attribution
Adweek, 4/8/2020 (Behind Paywall, read here)
Neustar, which offers an identity product, and iSpot.tv, a TV measurement and attribution vendor, are integrating to give brands a broader view of multitouch attribution that spans digital and all forms of television.
“We’re as close as the industry has ever been for marketers to have a true cross-channel attribution solution that actually works,” said Sean Muller, CEO of iSpot.tv, in an interview with Adweek.
More marketers are flocking to TV, the pandemic’s data gap and Millennial misery: Datacenter Weekly
Ad Age, 4/17/2020
Marketers [heart] TV
Data company iSpot.tv, which does always-on, real-time tracking of essentially every commercial that airs on U.S. national TV, has been conducting a detailed study of how marketers have been shifting their TV ad budgets both recently—as the coronavirus pandemic has escalated—and over time. The Bellevue, Washington-based company has given Datacenter an exclusive first look at its analysis, and here’s one of the most striking findings: Nearly 26 percent more brands—1,247 more—are advertising on TV today vs. a year ago.
TV advertising is a mess — meet 23 industry insiders working to fix it
Business Insider, 4/7/2020 (Behind Paywall, read here)
Sean Muller, founder and CEO, iSpot.TV
How he’s changing TV: He wants to make TV ads more measurable
Muller founded iSpot.TV in 2012 with the goal of speeding up how quickly marketers can pull data from TV campaigns and adjust budgets.
He wants advertisers and networks to start buying and selling TV ads based on metrics like conversions and incremental lift.
The firm is one of a handful of companies trying to solve measurement and attribution, which tracks ads to results like a sale or web visit, on linear and OTT commercials. ISpot.TV tracks all linear and streaming ads and pulls data straight from smart TVs.
Advertisers and networks like Fox Corp. license the firm’s technology to plan, target, and measure ads.
Multi-Touch Attribution Continues To Evolve At A Time When Accuracy Is Increasingly Critical
Forbes, 4/8/2020
Hence the interest in the recent news that iSpot and Neustar, two of the leading measurement and analytics companies used by the world’s biggest brands, would be joining forces to share measurement data so that clients would be able to track digital and television campaigns simultaneously.
Ad Buyers Take Cautious Approach In Unprecedented TV Upfront Market
Deadline, 5/25/2020
Advertisers also are learning to adapt in some positive ways, Muller said, and should see benefits longer-term after some short-term pain. Before the pandemic, he said, “a lot of advertisers were so you used to just setting a media plan at the beginning of the year, maybe making some tweaks once a quarter, and that was it. But with COVID-19, everybody was forced to make quick changes and decisions. And so I think the mindset is really change right now to ‘Wow, maybe we can be more nimble on TV and maybe we can optimize TV more rapidly and that can have really good results.’”
Who Won The Super Bowl Ad War? It Depends On How You Measure
Forbes, 2/3/2020
iSpot TV measures overall social engagement, and their metrics showed there was a very clear winner on gameday. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Bill Murray’s Jeep spot racked up a 14.58% digital share of voice on nearly 75,000 total social actions. That was nearly double the #2 ranked spot, Facebook Groups (featuring Sylvester Stalone and Chris Rock), which snagged an 8% digital share of voice on 32,800 social actions. Other buzzworthy spots according to iSpot’s metrics were GMC, Disney+, Marvel’s Black Widow, Google Assistant, and President Trump’s re-election commercial on criminal justice reform.
Without Sporting Events, Auto Industry’s Ad Spend Plummets
Adweek, 5/6/2020
As advertising budgets are slashed globally—especially within the travel industry, which saw ad spend in March drop by 90%—carmakers have been left with mostly idle factories. According to J.D. Power, car sales are down 40%, and a recession could curb new purchases on a longer-term basis.
“You have dealer lots with inventory piling up, and people are buying fewer cars because they’re quarantined and not going to dealerships,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, an analyst at iSpot. “Despite the fact that they’re spending less money, automakers are using the money they can spend to drive-in market activity.”
HOW TV VIEWING CHANGED OVER 45 DAYS OF LOCKDOWN
Ad Age, 4/30/2020
Less and more
Looking at the 45-day period from March 12 (when live sports came off the air) through April 26, TV spending year over year is down an estimated 22 percent (to $6.9 billion), according to iSpot. Automaker spending is down 54 percent, travel spend is hovering near nothing (save for opportunistic private jet companies), wireless is down 33 percent and movie studios are down 85 percent (from $278 million to $38 million).
Facing a fundraising squeeze, charities turn to TV ads
Digiday, 5/22/2020
According to iSpot.tv’s data — which captures impressions on national and local TV, plus video-on-demand and over-the-top services — healthcare and awareness nonprofits increased TV ad impressions to 5.63 billion from April through May 17, 2020. That figure was up 155% on the same period in 2019 and included an increase in weekend day programming and primetime slots. Healthcare and awareness charities include organizations such as American Red Cross, AARP Services, The Real Cost and BrightStar Care.
Oracle expands multi-platform audience reach metrics
FierceVideo, 5/19/2020
Oracle Data Cloud is adding a new product, Moat Reach, to better measure audience reach across digital, mobile and television.
To power the TV measurement section on Moat, Oracle is iSpot’s real-time impression verification and attention scoring, which uses 14 million opted-in TV devices to identify, extract, and catalog TV ads as they air.
Ad spending data reveals how streaming TV services like Netflix and Disney are changing their marketing tactics
Business Insider, 4/24/2020 (Behind Paywall, Read here)
“Streaming companies are seeing an opportunity in all of this chaos to complement the natural behavior for people to consume more video during the day,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, senior vice president of media partnerships at iSpot.tv.
Apple TV Plus, Hulu, and Quibi broke into the top 60 ad spenders in US TV during the period of March 20 to April 20, joining Amazon Prime Video, analysts at research firm LightShed Partners wrote in an April 21 blog post, which also cited iSpot.tv data. Amazon Prime Video was the only streaming-video service in the ranking during the prior 12-month period.