Tag: CTV

California, USA – Global ad platform Magnite has announced the conclusion of its acquisition of video ad platform SpotX, disclosed at an amount of US$640M in cash and 12,374,315 shares of Magnite stock.

Through the acquisition, both companies have created the largest independent connected TV (CTV) and video advertising platform, and reinforcing the company’s capabilities as linear TV budgets increasingly shift to digital, which works ideally for buyers and sellers that have long wanted a scaled, independent alternative to the giants that currently dominate the CTV marketplace.

Michael Barrett, president and CEO at Magnite, stated that scaling and reaching the largest possible audience is the name of the game when attracting the demand our CTV and video clients need, evident with the scale they have created with the recent acquisition.

“Acquiring SpotX positions us to become the world’s largest, independent source of highly-coveted CTV and video inventory. Two-thirds of our revenue is now concentrated in the fastest-growing segments of the market, and as linear TV dollars move to CTV, the greatest opportunity is still ahead of us,” Barrett stated.

Meanwhile, Mike Shehan, co-founder and CEO at SpotX, commented, “We’re thrilled to become a part of the Magnite family. CTV viewership and the ecosystem around it continues to evolve with new streaming services popping up every day and advertisers hoping to connect with those audiences.”

He added, “SpotX’s CTV business has experienced significant growth over the past year, and we believe our performance will only accelerate through this combination of resources by delivering even more value to our clients.”

Magnite, which now holds a large array of clients including A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Crackle, Discovery, FOX, among others, has also built a new Asia Pacific presence, as it announced last March the establishment of a new data center in Singapore.

Singapore – HUMAN, a cybersecurity company and formerly White Ops, has launched a new program that aims to defraud connected television (CTV) systems, in partnership with the newly-launched initiative ‘The Human Collective’ composed of Omnicom Media Group, The Trade Desk, and Magnite, as well as support from Google and Roku.

The launch of the program was in response to the spread of PARETO, a botnet that, according to nearly a million infected mobile Android devices, is pretending to be millions of people watching ads on smart TVs and other devices. The botnet used dozens of mobile apps to impersonate or spoof more than 6,000 CTV apps, accounting for an average of 650 million ad requests every day.

PARETO worked by spoofing signals within malicious Android mobile apps to impersonate consumer TV streaming products running Fire OS, tvOS, Roku OS, and other prominent CTV platforms. The botnet took advantage of digital shifts that were accelerated by the pandemic, hiding in the noise in order to trick advertisers and technology platforms into believing ads were being shown on CTVs. 

HUMAN’s research arm Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team found the PARETO operation in 2020 and has been working with the HUMAN team to prevent its impacts on clients ever since. The operation is named for The Pareto Principle, an economics concept that dictates that 80% of the impact in any given situation is carried out by only 20% of the actors.

“CTV provides massive opportunities for streaming services and brands to engage with consumers through compelling content and advertising. Because of this opportunity, it is incredibly important for the CTV ecosystem and brands to work together through a collectively protected advertising supply chain to ensure fraud is recognized, addressed, and eliminated as quickly as possible,” said Tamer Hassan, CEO and co-founder at HUMAN.

HUMAN also observed a far smaller but connected effort attempting to spoof consumer streaming platforms. The operation detected a single developer on Roku’s Channel Store with apps connected to PARETO. The apps linked to the developer, impacting less than one half of one percent of Roku’s active devices globally, were designed to communicate with the server that operates the PARETO botnet. The primary operation was associated with 29 Android apps and the secondary operation was associated with one Roku developer delivering the malware to infected devices.

“What’s especially striking about this operation is its scale and sophistication. The actors behind PARETO have a fundamental understanding of numerous aspects of advertising technology, and used that to their advantage in how they hid their work within the CTV ecosystem. Their efforts included low-level network protocol spoofing, which is especially hard to detect, but which our team at HUMAN spotted,” said Michael McNally, chief scientist at HUMAN.

The Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team used numerous tools to identify the sources of the botnet, whose information has been shared with law enforcement.

Sydney, Australia – Data analytics and brand consulting company Kantar in Australia has announced the launch of a new cookie-less brand efficiency measurement solution catered to connected television (CTV) and podcast brands.

The brand measurement tool was unveiled under Kantar’s Project Moonshot initiative, which establishes direct data integrations with global digital publishers and apps and provides advertisers with cookieless and privacy-centric methodologies to measure ad effectiveness. 

The tool, aside from being integrated into Kantar’s Brand Lift study which measures impact of media content based on consumer perception, allows publishers and advertisers to gather insights based on exposure data from permitted panelists in an anonymized and privacy-compliant way. Kantar’s proprietary approach uses deterministic exposure data from partner publishers combined with probabilistic approaches to convert household data like from a CTV to an individual person exposure.

According to Mark Henning, Kantar Australia’s executive director of media and digital, Kantar’s innovative new solution is playing a vital and leading role in ensuring continuity of measurement services in the impending post-cookie world. 

“This all shows that the digital ad world is getting tougher to target and measure. In the cookieless world, passive and deterministic data alone are no longer sufficiently comprehensive for effectiveness measurement across all digital platforms. Leveraging both permitted deterministic and probabilistic approaches in a hybrid capacity provides the most reliable and cost-effective way to capture a complete picture of campaign performance and a deeper well for divining useful insights,” Henning stated.

He also notes that using a range of integration approaches depending on publisher capabilities, brands can match the Kantar Profiles Network panelists directly with publisher ecosystem users in a privacy-compliant way.

“This enables us to ingest campaign level exposure data for matched panelists/publisher users without cookies, then consolidate and reconcile exposure data across publishers and platforms to provide a holistic picture of Brand Lift performance. It gives us something powerful to connect with technology back to individuals in a faster, more scalable, and streamlined way,” Henning concluded.

New York, USA – Digital media analytics platform DoubleVerify (DV) has announced a new brand safety solution for connected TV (CTV), which will offer app-level transparency for advertisers and brands. 

The development of the solution, which is first in the industry, is in response to advertisers’ concern with regards to the lack of standardization of data on the app due to bundled app and content-level data shared to them. 

DV provides all the information advertisers need including the real world app name, the devices and IDs associated with it. It eliminates the non standard and random Bundle IDs which, typically, only contain a subset of the programs where their campaign ran across and does not have guarantee of accuracy.

One of the significant features of DV’s CTV solution is its inclusion and exclusion lists which allow advertisers to target or avoid specific CTV apps, aligning their inventory and brand suitability. 

The solution also enables advertisers to measure the quality of their campaigns and determine infractions through its delivery reporting, allowing them to optimize their campaigns in-flight and refine their strategies in the future.

According to DV CEO Mark Zagorski, as a higher number of audiences use its platform, advertisers’ demand for transparency in CTV will continue to accelerate.

“We’re proud to be the first in the market to introduce this solution and enable effective CTV app-level brand safety and suitability controls for global advertisers,” Zagorski said.

“Our new inclusion and exclusion lists empower advertisers to assume greater control over brand-content fit, by selecting only apps that align with their suitability standards and criteria. If there is no clear or verified data specific to the environments and programs where CTV campaigns run, then every advertiser is exposed to brand suitability risk when buying on CTV,” He added. 

Earlier this year, DV also launched a new transparency and reporting solution for CTV inventory to address the lack of obscurity in CTV. The solution provides full transparency for buyers accurate data on where their CTV campaigns have run.  This solution charts app names across platforms and devices with more than 6,000 apps mapped across leading industry platforms.