Nielsen may be the top name in TV measurement — an industry juggernaut for 92 years with annual revenues of more than $6 billion and a market value of nearly $17 billion. In fact, founder Arthur Nielsen is even credited with coining the term “market share.”
But there’s a three-year-old newcomer that’s looking to make its mark in the world of TV measurement, taking a different approach from its longstanding rivals. iSpot.tv, a Bellevue-based startup that today is announcing $21.9 million in venture funding, is making its mark with advertisers with a real-time analytics service that tell large advertisers like Sony Pictures, T-Mobile, Volvo and more than 150 other clients whether very specific advertising campaigns are resonating.
“Most traditional measurement companies in TV focus on measuring shows first, and ads secondary,” said iSpot.tv founder and CEO Sean Muller. “We are the other way around. We measure ads first, and then the shows are secondary. And as you can imagine, as the world is moving away from show-based buying to more audience buying, some of the traditional ways of measuring television just aren’t going to work in this new world.”
iSpot.tv believes it will be the company to capitalize on this shift, and so do its deep-pocketed venture investors, including Madrona Venture Group and Insight Venture Partners. Total funding in the 60-person company, which is expected to top 100 employees by the end of this year, now stands at about $28 million. Meanwhile, Pitchbook pegs the post-money valuation at $129 million.
Some of the new money will be used for iSpot.tv to expand its analytics capabilities to local TV advertising, as well as a push into what Muller vaguely describes as “viewability measurement for television.”
He declined to go into further detail on this new effort.
Muller said the concept behind iSpot — which has largely existed of its own cash flows to date — is relatively simple. The company’s proprietary audio and video fingerprinting technology automatically can determine when ads are appearing on TV and which specific ads are resonating.
“We brought two concepts to the TV measurement marketplace which really have not existed prior,” Muller tells GeekWire. “One is just simply, real time data, which sounds crazy, because in the digital world, everything is real time. But, in TV, everything has been much more archaic. And the second thing we’ve brought into the marketplace is the ability to assess the performance of TV based on the earned digital signal, and what I mean by that is that our platform actually looks at how consumers are responding and interaction to TV ads across search, social and online video, and uses that as a signal to basically measure the effectiveness of creatives and media plans and the competitive landscape on television.”
The level of detail that iSpot.tv provides is impressive.
For example, searching the site for “Zillow” returns several of the advertising campaigns for the Seattle-based online real estate juggernaut, including one dubbed “Lake House.”
iSpot.tv users not only can watch the commercial, but see when it last aired (53 minutes ago as of this writing on CNN Tonight); the mood of the commercial which in this case is dubbed “emotional” and the total number of national airings (6,254). Paying customers of the service get even more detail, comparing their advertising efforts to those of competitors or tracking how the campaign is playing with very specific audiences.
iSpot.tv offers some other fun insights. For example, the company lists the top 10 most digitally engaging ad campaigns — now populated with ads from Supercell, State Farm, EA and Netflix. It also shows the top spenders on TV ad campaigns over the past seven days — now dominated by Warner Bros. (an estimated spend of $34.2 million); Ford (estimated spend of $16.3 million); Geico ($16.2 million); McDonald’s ($15.8 million); and Microsoft Surface ($15.4 million).
It also allows users to dive deep into specific industries, say mattress stores or pizza restaurants or cruiselines.
Fun factoids and deep analysis like that are helping to drive awareness to iSpot, which is now attracting about five million unique visitors each month who come to view its library of more than 100,000 TV ads.
While some have written about the death of traditional television, Muller said that people are spending more time than ever watching video programming.
“When we talk about TV and viewability, we are talking about the TV device, not linear TV per se,” said Muller.
In fact, iSpot believes it can help advertisers adapt to this new world of television.
“We are going to be helping them understand exactly what their buys get them, whereas in the old world all of the measurement solutions were focused around what you get for your linear buy,” he said.
Previously on GeekWire: iSpot.tv raises $5M, looks to provide better advertising insights by analyzing 35,000 TV commercials
