New Partnership Focuses on Driving Incremental Reach

When it comes to CTV, streaming, and linear, viewers tend to think, “It’s all TV to me.” For advertisers, agencies, and publishers, however, there are tremendous differences and challenges in all three because they are concerned with engagement, platform, viewing frequency, demographics, data, ad targeting, and incremental reach. The Holy Grail lies in accurate and actionable measurement across all of these variables.

To that end, RSMB and Streamhub have entered a partnership to provide clients with RSMB’s currency-grade data-modeling capabilities along with Streamhub’s multi-dataset analytics and activation platform. The goal is to build out incremental-reach calculations for clients.

Reach calculations will enable stakeholders to determine and integrate data and reach delivered by streaming services over and above the reach of linear TV. Using currency metrics and first-party data, the partnership starts first in Japan where Streamhub will be representing RSMB’s capability in the market. An international rollout is planned down the road.

According to recent research from TVision, the majority of viewing households (55%), watch both linear and CTV, compared to 27% of viewers who only watched TV through CTV Apps. Meanwhile, 18% of viewers watched TV exclusively via broadcast sources.

Streamhub is an independent audience analytics and activation company based in the U.K. and has a strong presence in Japan. RSMB provides audience measurement solutions for the media industry. Also based in the U.K., RSMB is jointly owned by Kantar and Havas.

Streamhub founder Aki Tsuchiya went into more detail about the partnership.

In your view, what are the three biggest challenges for the ad-media-marketing-tech industry in the CTV, streaming, and linear TV space?

• Fragmented audiences and categorizations/taxonomy make it difficult to carry out effective holistic campaigns.
• Lack of a unified measurement standard across platforms as well as amongst CTV / streaming providers.
• Difficulty in purchasing and planning premium inventory across linear and the various CTV / streaming providers.

Please explain clearly what this partnership will do and what it will achieve on behalf of clients.

This partnership will help unify the measurement of the fragmented TV/CTV/Streaming market. The partnership brings together the different domains of expertise in big-data analytics and panel audience measurement with a view to creating viable unified measurement solutions across linear and streaming.

On the one hand, it provides RSMB with access to Streamhub’s analytics, activation, and overall data management capabilities. In turn, RSMB provides Streamhub with audience calculation methodologies and formulas that include blending panel and census measurements for use in diverse media applications.

It will provide clients both on the sell-side and buy-side with reliable deduplicated measurement across linear, CTV, and streaming platforms.

What problems does this partnership solve in the CTV, streaming, and linear TV space?

Together with the key stakeholders in the media advertising industry, the partnership provides a relatively quick solution to the following problems:

• A unified, incremental reach measurement solution across premium TV and CTV platforms that can be customized for each market and potentially be considered as a new currency working with existing TAM providers such as Kantar, Nielsen, Gfk, Ipsos, etc.
• A proven single analytics platform shared across media companies to unify and measure all CTV and streaming audiences for both programs and advertising reporting.
• It helps media companies, agencies, and research companies have a reliable, centralized, yet independent data platform to manage all audience-measurement sources. This removes the need for unnecessary investment into expensive data resources and technologies and stays true to the mantra of sustaining a regulated, brand-safe, and transparent marketplace for advertising.

Why did you choose to implement the partnership in Japan?

The partnership is global in nature, with both companies headquartered in London, UK. It just so happens that the first ideal opportunity with the right set of conditions presented itself in the Japanese market.

When will the partnership’s offering roll out internationally, and to which markets?

We are already working on opportunities in other markets outside of Japan. We will make announcements in due course.

Which company initiated this partnership, and why are RSMB and Streamhub a good match to offer this?

It was a mutual approach as we started to learn more about each other’s capabilities mediated by certain industry figureheads.