Measurement and analytics company 605 said it is launching a platform that will help programmers and advertisers plan, buy, assess and attribute advanced advertising campaigns.
AMC Networks and Discovery are the first two programmers to sign up for a pilot test of the 605 Platform, the company said.
The 605 Platform will enable the TV ad business as a whole with digital giants like Google and Facebook, said Noah Levine, chief revenue officer of 605, which is backed by Dolan Family Ventures.
“We have the ability to provide the most robust lens on the existing pay-TV ecosystem and wrap that with a next-generation layer of actionability,” Levine said.
The new platform is able to develop currency-quality projections of target audiences, which puts it in competition with the TV industry’s established measurement leaders, Nielsen and Comscore.
“We are very focused on the advanced television marketplace and competing with them on their advanced-television offerings” for data-optimized audience targeting for linear TV and VOD, as well as verifying impression delivery for addressable ad campaigns.
Levine said that 605 plans to sell its platform to media buyers and sophisticated clients. “We’re completely independent,” he said. “We don’t favor the buy said. We don’t favor the sell side.
And that while AMC and Discovery are the first two network clients to sign up, 605 expects to announce more network groups shortly, said Levine, who joined 605 from Fox last April.
“Consumer viewing habits are changing and the marketplace is undergoing rapid transformation. More than ever, data and technology play an integral role in capturing audience behavior,” said Keith Kazerman, executive VP, digital ad sales, advanced advertising and research at Discovery. “Discovery is happy to partner with 605’s platform to help bring the industry closer to the goal of helping to identify the most impactful audiences for our clients, enabling them to tell their story and achieve measurable results.”
Discovery had been working with 605 on ad attribution.
Discovery and AMC will be able to use the platform to plan their upfront and to look at their inventory “in ways that historically have been very challenging,” Levine said. Feedback from Discovery and AMC will help 605 fine tune its platform.
“Reliably knowing how and where the passionate viewers of our shows are interacting with our content is more important today than it has ever been, and more challenging,” said Kim Kelleher, president of advertising sales and partnerships for AMC Networks. “605’s Platform pulls proprietary data from a wide range of sources and then analyzes that data in a way that is invaluable as we seek to leverage the strength of our content for our advertising partners and brands. The days of focusing on any one platform or ratings report are over, in today’s environment we need to focus on everything that is happening and that is the competitive advantage delivered by 605’s Platform.”
605 pulls viewer data from Charter and Frontier cable set-top boxes and from Vizio smart TV’s via Inscape.
The 605 Platform allows users to incorporate their own first-party and third-party data and an API makes it interoperable with other buying and selling systems.
605 is able to measure linear TV, OTT, DVR viewing and set-top box video on demand and is uniquely able to determine incremental reach at a granular level.
There are about a million homes where the data 605 gets from set-top boxes overlap with the data it gets from smart TVs. That allows us to develop superior projection methodologies,” Levine said.
The platform will also deliver measurements that go beyond C3 and C7, counting impressions no matter who long after their initial airing viewers choose to watch shows and commercials.
