Dentsu, VideoAmp guarantee audience across major publishers

• Dentsu and VideoAmp today (Oct. 12) announced an activation that permits 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, amongst others.
• The offering, which press materials consult with as an industry-first capability, provides advertisers a unified solution for planning and measurement and is a major step for VideoAmp because it continues to determine itself instead currency to legacy currencies like Nielsen.

Dentsu and VideoAmp, in a deepening of an existing partnership, show how agencies and ad tech corporations are working together to develop alternative currencies and deliver on the promise of advanced audiences and massive data at scale. Dentsu already has numerous clients testing the answer, but further details usually are not publicly available, per a Dentsu spokesperson.

The recent solution allows advertisers to guarantee a campaign across major publishers and long tail content providers similar to 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 higher outcomes and better return on ad spend.

“As we glance to the longer term of seamless video investment for our clients, this revolutionary partnership represents a positive shift within the marketplace, enabling advertisers to more effectively reach more helpful audiences in premium placements,” said Brad Stockton, senior vp of video innovation at Dentsu, in an announcement.

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 supply currency-grade data and insights, optimizing media spend and helping advertisers more effectively reach goal audiences.

The race to determine 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 remains to be volatile. While VideoAmp recently secured $150 million in Series G funding, the corporate also laid off about 10% of its workforce — a move echoing the share of layoffs that Nielsen undertook around the identical time.