Undertone, the creator of cross-platform Creative Synchronized Digital Branding for the world’s most prominent brands, announced that as part of its effort to eliminate confusion and promote enhanced purchase practices surrounding Automated Content Recognition (ACR) in the ad tech market, it has introduced an ACR Buyer’s Guide and accompanying Workbook for brands who are trying to buy smart TV viewership data intelligently.

“We’ve got the trust of some big brands who came to us for omnichannel plans, and because we have all that experience, we’ve become authorities in this new data source. So for the sake of the industry, we’re sharing.”

It’s obvious that today’s US consumers are no longer single-source viewers and we have to follow them where they are. They may watch an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes of TV every day, but it is broken up by a whopping 6 hours and 35 minutes of digital time.* Marketers know this, but struggle to identify data that follows this fragmented behavior. ACR is a welcome answer, but only if eager vendors don’t create yet another ad tech situation rife with misinformation and confusion caused by industry infighting and over complexity.

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ACR is a relatively new and growing form of viewership data available in the marketplace, for which there are specific privacy rules. It is collected from smart TVs whose viewers have double opted in and can be used for omnichannel retargeting. But like everything else in ad tech, this data must be scrutinized by people who understand the space. For example, some vendors are offering data that is not collected directly from the TV sets, while others are offering data from TV sets outside the US. The numbers sometimes just don’t add up.

“Data acquisition is a complex business,” said Dan Aks, President of Undertone. “It’s easy to be misled by either the scale or the quality of the data offered for sale unless you know what questions to ask the vendors, which include collection methods, activated/optioned-in TVs, data latency and much more. Not asking these questions leads to obtaining lower quality and less effective data for retargeting. Indeed, data certification start-ups are already forming.

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“To help the marketplace make better decisions and prevent misinformation, Undertone is making our ACR Buyer’s Guide available for download here, and a Workbook that can be downloaded here.” Brands may download them and use them to make better decisions, whether they are Undertone clients or not.

“Our brand and advertiser clients are so hungry for good data captured from linear TV and available for real-time retargeting on digital platforms that we’ve sold 17 large deals just since the start of the year,” Aks continued. “We’ve got the trust of some big brands who came to us for omnichannel plans, and because we have all that experience, we’ve become authorities in this new data source. So for the sake of the industry, we’re sharing.”

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