Tru Optik launches a Political Data Cloud for OTT and Connected TV
“Nobody else has the ability to do this level of granular targeting” for political campaigns on OTT and CTV, the company's Chief Strategist told ClickZ.
“Nobody else has the ability to do this level of granular targeting” for political campaigns on OTT and CTV, the company's Chief Strategist told ClickZ.
Tru Optik, a data management platform for over-the-top (OTT) and connected TV (CTV), has announced the launch of its Political Data Cloud for targeting political ads to programming on those platforms.
Chief Strategist David Wiesenfeld told ClickZ that “nobody else has the ability to do this level of granular targeting” for political campaigns on OTT and CTV.
Over-the-top TV is video programming delivered via the Net to TVs and other devices, through such applications as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and Crackle that can reside in external devices like Roku. CTV refers to TV sets that have an Internet connection, and which often include those OTT apps inside the set.
The ad targeting is focused on ad-supported OTT services, such as those offered by Sony’s Crackle or the basic Hulu subscription. The Data Cloud aggregates voter registration and behavioral segments from such providers as L2, Comscore and Dataline, as well as nearly a dozen providers affiliated with the two major US political parties.
The new Data Cloud, part of Tru Optik’s OTT Data Marketplace for targeting by regular ads, can also target streaming audio through Tru Optik partnership’s with digital audio platform Triton.
Wiesenfeld said there are about 95 million households in the US that can access ad-supported OTT programming, and the new Political Data Cloud can see about 80 million of them. In the last two federal elections of 2018 and 2016, he said, there were some targeted OTT and CTV ads, but they were selected by geography or by context, such as the type of TV program.
The granularity for the new Political Data Cloud is household level, defined by IP address and device ID that are mapped by third-party data providers to other data sets. As a result, this Cloud can determine how many registered Democrats, Republicans or independents live in each household, based largely on voter registration.
Political advertisers can then target and deliver their ads programmatically at program inventory in those ad-supported OTT networks, for those households that contain the targeted voter(s). The Data Cloud can’t tell who is watching Hulu, for instance, in a household that may contain both a registered Democrat and a registered Republican.
Additionally, he said, the Cloud contains probabilistic issue-oriented models that can target such segments as registered independents who are likely to support gun control, and those segments are also available for ad targeting.