Roku and Nielsen announced a partnership that will consist of the streamer acquiring the analyst’s Advanced Video Advertising business, which includes Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition and dynamic ad insertion technologies. The acquisition will drive Roku’s end-to-end DAI solution launch with TV programmers. “Tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent annually on traditional TV advertising,” said Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku. “Combining Nielsen’s AVA technology with Roku’s innovative ad tech and scale will enable us to deliver the benefits of TV streaming advertising to traditional TV.
Nielsen and Roku will also include Nielsen ad and content measurement products into the Roku platform and further develop Nielsen ONE, the company’s cross-media measurement system.“Roku will bring the promise of DAI to the market for the first time ever at scale, providing better targeting and measurement for advertisers, creating easy integration and additional revenue opportunities for programmers’ ad sales teams, and improving the TV experience for viewers," Parampath said.
The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021, subject to customary closing conditions. Upon closing, Roku looks forward to welcoming Nielsen AVA employees and taking ownership of an extensive portfolio of foundational ACR and DAI patents. Roku TV models already feature ACR today and will include DAI soon. “The measurement of ads and content on Roku devices will accelerate the path to a single, deduplicated cross-media currency,” Scott N. Brown, GM, Audience Measurement, Nielsen. “As Roku brings the power of dynamic ad insertion to all forms of TV, we’re excited to help monetize the addressable market by measuring smart TV as a currency, which Nielsen can do at scale.”
The two companies will enter into a long-term commercial agreement to leverage Total Ad Ratings on the Roku platform. Specifically, Roku’s media sales and ad-buying platform, OneView, will natively integrate Nielsen's “always-on” Digital Ad Ratings for advertisers. Roku will also enable publishers to implement Nielsen Digital Content Ratings. The collaboration with Roku will significantly enlarge the footprint of smart TVs and other devices, nearing 100 million in total, thus helping media buyers and sellers to better monetize addressable advertising.
Roku will bring the promise of DAI to the market for the first time ever at scale, providing better targeting and measurement for advertisers, creating easy integration and additional revenue opportunities for programmers’ ad sales teams, and improving the TV experience for viewers. ” Louqman Parampath VP of Product Management, Roku