VIZIO Ads Closes Upfront with $100M+ in Commitments from Agency Holding Companies and Brands

VIZIO today announced it has successfully closed its 2022 upfront negotiations and secured brand and agency advertising commitments in excess of $100 million, a fourfold increase over 2021.

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“We’re providing agencies with access to premium CTV inventory, the ability to target and measure with precision and access to insights that can inform their investment strategies for all linear and CTV.”

These commitments include enterprise-level buys from six major agency holding companies and increased investment from a number of top advertising categories in traditional TV such as automotive, insurance and retail. VIZIO’s upfront success is supplemented by its growing direct advertising business, which in the last year has doubled participating unique brands and tripled average revenue per advertiser.

This accelerating advertiser demand is aligned with broader market shifts, as consumers increasingly move from linear TV to streaming and advertisers seek the unique audiences that VIZIO — whose smart TVs are in millions of homes across America — supplies. Increased demand can also be attributed to VIZIO’s diverse, innovative ad offerings introduced during the 2021 IAB NewFronts, and its strategic use of its Inscape Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data, which allows VIZIO to package media spend commitments with data licenses for planning and measurement.

“We’ve developed an advertising business model that is unique in the industry,” said Mike O’Donnell, Chief Revenue Officer of VIZIO’s Platform Business. “We’re providing agencies with access to premium CTV inventory, the ability to target and measure with precision and access to insights that can inform their investment strategies for all linear and CTV.”

VIZIO Ads offerings are fueled by Inscape’s unparalleled audience data from next-level ACR technology, making them increasingly popular with brands and agencies because VIZIO is able to provide greater transparency, accuracy, relevancy and control. Inscape’s glass-level TV viewing data allows VIZIO to offer its advertising partners measurement products that demonstrate the incremental reach of VIZIO’s streaming audiences, and provide attribution that connects ad buys to business incomes. In addition, the company recently announced frequency capping, which gives brands control over how often a device is exposed to an ad on VIZIO smart TVs. The data also enables advertisers to reach the VIZIO audience across mobile devices, desktops, and tablets, delivering the right advertising to the right audience at the right time.

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Relevant Programming Drives Growth in FAST Channels

VIZIO continues to increase its exclusive ad inventory with the recently launched WatchFree+, an offering of more than 260 free ad-supported TV channels that leverage viewer data to surface relevant channels and content to audiences. VIZIO also launched Features, with curated channels offering data-informed programming placed prominently on the SmartCast home screen. These curated products can be sponsored across verticals such as travel, food, mystery, crime, seasonal programming, themed programming collections, and pop-up channels — all exclusive to VIZIO’s WatchFree+ audiences.

In addition to offering targeted video advertising across linear and AVOD, VIZIO Ads is successfully monetizing the search and discovery process through innovative ad units such as in-banner video and sponsored curated content hubs on the SmartCast home screen of all VIZIO smart TVs.

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