Connected TV

Last Tuesday, Roku announced that they would be acquiring dataxu for $150 million in cash and stock.  While the details of the deal are still unknown—Roku is a public company—there are some good things that will come of this deal agencies, advertisers and other partners will benefit.  Here are 3 reasons why Roku buying dataxu is a good thing for advertisers.

1)  Roku’s advertisers will be gaining an experienced data-driven solution in dataxu

This includes software and people.  The team at dataxu have spent years refining their tech for efficiency in programmatic media deployment across all devices and audiences.  Roku stands to learn a great deal from the data science and optimizations teams as they deploy omni-channel programs across the OTT and display ecosystems.  Giving Roku and dataxu much greater position in the market to compete with the likes of Amazon or Apple to name a few 800 lbs. gorillas in the room.  Moreover, Roku’s intent is to build quite the OTT marketplace while remaining open to other DSPs benefiting all who are inclined to increase their streaming TV ad budgets.

 

2)  For dataxu’s advertisers, OneView gets a very big nod.

If you’ve been a long-time dataxu advertiser, or even a new one, you’ve known about their device graph of graphs, OneView, which takes a mix of partner and proprietary device graphs to attribute activity from one device to conversions on another.  Streaming TV’s measurement and attribution is ever evolving, and some do it better than others; marketers are demanding this to tighten up as each quarter passes.  With this acquisition, Roku puts a very large stamp of approval on dataxu’s ability to connect devices between users and households in TV and across other channels.

 

3)  The increased availability of Connected TV to new advertisers, no matter your budget

While CTV is a growing channel in today’s media plans, I still see hesitation to include it due to fear of not knowing how the supply chain, performance, budgets, reporting, and all the other objections you can think of to not do something.  In reality, all of those fears go away when a DSP can embed its technology much closer to the distribution company, streamlining the process.

New advertisers will be able to access TV inventory in a way they’ve never dreamed, with less headaches and lower budget minimums (if at all) than they’re used to with linear buys.

 

Final Thoughts

First, it must be said that mediate.ly is a Platform Partner of dataxu, an endowment we’re proud of.  At mediate.ly we take the stance, if you’re doing pre-roll video, you can be doing CTV, and often insist they do.  What advertisers lack in clicks to website from this medium, they gain in brand exposure and conversion actions.

While both these companies are going to gain their respective advantages from this deal, mediate.ly also stands to gain from this partnership too: we gain authority in our position to include video in our media plans.  We gain a newly-minted team of professionals that can be tapped when our advertisers require more complexity.  We gain—or continue to use—the best technology to bring to our clients’ media plans as our teams deploy campaigns.  Always.

 

If you want to learn more about Connected TV advertising for your agency or brand, drop us a note at hello@mediate.ly, call 561.868.9080, or contact us.

 

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