The benefits of ACR technology for advertisers

David Barker, Samba TV's SVP of Global Commercial Partnerships, on why ACR technology can help CTV advertisers reach audiences  

Around the world, TV viewership has long been used to help marketers understand their audiences better. In the UK, however, there’s still quite a bit about Connected TV and its privacy-first opportunities for deeper audience insight that is not as well understood or leveraged. 

Now, more than ever, TV viewership is fragmenting from traditional linear to on-demand offerings - from broadcasters and cable or satellite operators as well as streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, iPlayer, YouTube, Rakuten, UKTV, Channel 5, Discovery, and more. Audiences are at home more, but they’re even harder to reach for marketers that have historically focused on linear. 

In this fragmenting landscape, marketers need new ways to access comprehensive audience insights to inform their media campaigns, optimise reach and frequency, and yield increased returns. Privacy-compliant automatic content recognition (ACR) is the technology that can provide this necessarily holistic view of audiences across all platforms, eliminating the need for piecemeal solutions.
 

What is ACR?

ACR is an identification technology that allows specific television content to be recognised by video, audio, or watermarking to identify content through cues or codes in real-time, regardless of source. This includes commercials, programs, networks, gaming, and genres that can be tied to a specific household depending on the accuracy and efficacy of the ACR methodology. 
 

What do marketers gain from ACR?

ACR provides marketers with comprehensive insights into what their audiences are watching and how campaigns are performing without reliance on piecemealing platform-specific viewing data. 

The fragmentation across TV and video shows no sign of stopping and, with this transformation, we’ve seen new viewing behaviours emerge, such as ad-skipping, time-shifting, and binge-watching. ACR helps navigate these behaviours with imperative insights for brands to better strategise campaigns by adjusting for reach and frequency to better reach audiences. 

This real-time insight helps bridge the gap between TV and digital, and powers privacy-compliant audience targeting. Marketers can deliver relevant digital advertising to devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops associated with the household TV on which video content is consumed.

Naturally, privacy compliance is a fundamental component that must be assessed with any ACR technology. Marketers should ensure these technologies meet or exceed the privacy compliance requirements of regulations such as GDPR. It is essential that these technologies achieve this through a clear consent process as well as an easily accessible tool for consumers to manage their settings and data available.  

As TV and video consumption fragments, video-based ACR is an effective path forward for marketers to optimise digital advertising strategies and reach target audiences, whatever they are watching. To gain a deeper understanding of ACR technology, read Samba TV's whitepaper here.