Roku acquires Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business

Roku is boosting its linear ad proposition by buying Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business, bringing Nielsen’s video ad targeting technologies into Roku’s stable. The Roku acquisition will include Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition and dynamic ad insertion technologies, and will strengthen Roku’s proposition to advertisers in the linear TV space. “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,” said Louqman Parampath, VP of product management at Roku, in a statement. Roku says Nielsen’s dynamic ad insertion technology will boost TV ad inventory by turning linear TV viewers on Roku’s platform into addressable audiences. Ad insertion can dynamically replace national and local ads, serving up targeted advertising to linear TV viewers in real time, making it more competitive with other forms of precise ad delivery. “The way the addressable market will grow is ultimately it being able to be monetized and compared to linear at scale,” says Scott N. Brown, GM, audience measurement, Nielsen. Meanwhile, Roku says Nielsen’s automatic content recognition technology can detect ads in real time, letting advertisers better measure and target Roku audiences. As part of the deal, Roku also will enter into a long-term commercial agreement to use Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings for advertisers in Roku’s ad-buying platform, OneView. Under the agreement, Roku will integrate Nielsen’s ads and content measurement products into Roku’s platform, including Nielsen One. Roku says this will make every campaign running on its platforms automatically measurable by Nielsen. Publishers can also enable Nielsen’s digital content ratings, which will help measure content consumption on Roku. For Nielsen, this adds a streaming TV data source the measurement company can now tap into. Both companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021 and remains subject to approval.

Roku acquires Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business

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