- Programmatic ad company Viant Technology has acquired connected TV content data platform IRIS.TV, the businesses announced. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
- The acquisition is meant to provide Viant a bonus in the case of transparency in CTV inventory. IRIS.TV uses a synthetic intelligence-enhanced proprietary content identifier that gives agencies and advertisers access to contextual, emotional and brand-suitability data.
- The deal may also give IRIS.TV the flexibility to expand its content identification across more premium publishers. The firm has already integrated with greater than 1,400 video content owners, platforms and content management systems. It has also indexed greater than 60 million streaming video files.
The IRIS.TV platform was designed to deal with the shortage of standardization in video content classification across the CTV space. As CTV promoting spend continues to grow, ad tech firms like Viant need to ease advertisers’ fears around transparency, measurement and that their ads will run next to objectionable content, an issue that has dogged digital promoting for years and something that the IRIS.TV deal could help Viant address.
CTV spending was up nearly 50% year-over-year during Viant’s third quarter, with Co-Founder and CEO Tim Vanderhook saying the channel is becoming “increasingly critical” for advertisers, during an earnings call. The IRIS.TV acquisition reflects Viant’s ambitions to be a trusted programmatic partner within the space.
“[IRIS.TV’s] added layer of context provides advertisers with a richer understanding of the videos accompanying their ads, empowering safer, smarter, and more impactful CTV ad campaigns,” he continued.
Though connected TV has been around for years, the more moderen development of major platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime moving to ad-supported programming is a big shift that agencies and advertisers are still determining.
“Marketers are still within the very early stages of CTV buying,” said Chris Vanderhook, Viant co-founder and COO, on the earnings call. “Most CTV buying is finished by just targeting the app name. The problem with that is that marketers should not in a position to easily goal specific varieties of content and they cannot measure which varieties of content drives one of the best results.”
Viant executives in the course of the call cited IRIS.TV’s recent success with a CTV campaign for Carl’s Jr., which used contextual data to interact young men all in favour of topics reminiscent of anime, gaming and sports. Using the info and IRIS.TV’s proprietary identifier, the fast-food chain realized a 35% lift in incremental visits, a 152% increase in incremental sales and a 2.2 times return on ad spend.
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