iSpot.tv announced today that it has acquired Joseph Gray's firm, DRMetrix.
Readers of this blog will be quite familiar with DRMetrix as it is the service that delivers the industry's preferred weekly ranking of DRTV spending. Its technology is also the source of my monthly True Top 10 charts as well as my annual True Top 50 reports.
On the other hand, many may only know iSpot.tv as a useful place to find and watch commercials. The company clearly has much larger ambitions. It seems the service intends to be the one place its clients can go to measure all aspects of their television advertising campaigns.
For instance, earlier this year iSpot acquired Ace Metrix, a research firm that specializes in understanding what consumers think of advertising creative. Using fast focus groups and the latest technological tools for measuring reactions, iSpot via Ace can now help clients understand the persuasive power of their commercials.
With the acquisition of DRMetrix, iSpot gains the technology to detect when national cable networks are running those commercials in both national and Digital Program Insertion (DPI) ad breaks.
“DRMetrix has developed unique and real-time measurement capabilities around creative versioning and dynamic advertising that will become increasingly important as the TV ad market evolves,” says Sean Muller, founder and CEO of iSpot, in today's release.
That evolution is happening quickly. So-called “linear” TV (traditional broadcast and cable television) is shedding viewers at an alarming pace. The challenge is following these “cord cutters” to streaming apps such as YouTube and over-the-top (OTT) services such as Hulu, what iSpot calls “time-shifted, VOD [video on demand] and streaming environments.”
It's exactly that challenge that has Joseph Gray most excited about today's announcement. In a recent conversation, he told me that iSpot gives DRMetrix the ability to determine “household level exposure to TV commercials via devices such as smart TVs.”
“The direct-response industry has always been challenged to measure certain things, such as cover-ups on network cable,” Joseph said. “Now national networks are giving DR advertisers the leftover part of the audience from advanced advertising campaigns and billing it as a traditional DPI ad break. The lack of transparency is frustrating.”
“Advertisers and agencies need a way to understand this type of delivery, and that's why we are incredibly excited to join forces with iSpot,” he continued. “When you measure ad impressions at the 'consumer glass' level (the device itself), quantifying all of these different types of delivery becomes possible.”
