FourthWall Media has entered a partnership arrangement with Starcom MediaVest Group giving the media planning and buying agency access to FourthWall’s set-top box viewership data as a means of more closely matching advertisers to the viewers interested in them.
SMG will integrate FourthWall’s anonymous, non-aggregated granular datasets with the agency’s proprietary planning and buying platform, dubbed TARDIIS, as well as its multi-touch attribution analytics platform. The integration will enable SMG’s clients to create more precisely targeted campaigns and maximize their media buying budgets, the agency said.
The two companies have also brought in data aggregator Axciom, which has prior relationships with both, to ensure compliance with digital privacy regulations via its Safe Haven program. Safe Haven matches first-party data, advertiser data and other partners’ data, scrubbing out anything that personally identifies end users (i.e., viewers) and replacing it with a generic but unique ID to use in multiple marketing applications. (Watch a video about the Safe Haven program here.)
Bill Feininger, president of FourthWall’s MassiveData division, said SMG is the first agency to have access to its granular viewership data, which it collects from all TV channels on a second-by-second basis via technology embedded in millions of set-top boxes. The company, based in Dulles, Va., provides its technology platform for use in Cisco, Motorola, Pace and tru2way set-top boxes, and its products are in use by a broad range of U.S. cable operators.
“Being able to anonymously match set-top viewing data with target audience lists creates more precise targeting of television advertising,” Feininger said. “We can do this in a privacy-compliant fashion using Acxiom to match target audiences with their television viewing activity.”
The three-way partnership aims to enable expanded analytics that SMG can make available to its clients.
"As a longtime believer in the power of set-top box data to transform TV, it is very exciting to have this kind of access to large-scale, granular data that can help our clients more precisely plan, place and optimize media," Lisa Weinstein, president of SMG’s Global Digital, Data & Analytics unit, said.
