TV still gets the lion’s share of the advertising budget, with ad slots being valued against the well-established audience measurement mechanisms in place. However TV’s dominant position is being eroded by the rise of online video, which has the advantage of accurate and powerful monitoring, as well as enabling advertisers to connect with consumers through automated bidding engines based on who is watching what, when and where.

Utilizing content identification-based solutions, such as fingerprinting and watermarking, can help broadcasters, operators and advertisers get a precise grasp of users’ viewing behaviour, enabling them to offer content better suited to their target audiences. This is especially crucial in large-scale, high-growth markets such as India, where television accounts for 44% of ad spend, according to media agency GroupM. In fact, this is one of the reasons the Indian Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) has deployed a state-of-the-art audience measurement system based on Civolution’s audio watermarking technology, recently acquired by WPP’s Kantar Media. It enables broadcasters and content owners who operate in India to clearly understand the viewing habits of 600 million TV and payTV viewer.

In addition to granular measurement of the content being watched, the solution features support for catch-up TV. This enables it to offer cross-platform audience measurement, including mobile devices.

Why did Civolution sell its audio watermarking division to Kantar Media earlier this year?

Civolution’s audio watermarking technology is recognized as world leading and is deployed in several hundreds of TV channels and second screen apps across the globe for the purpose of audience measurement and second screen synchronization. The technology offers the group a future-proofed audience measurement system that covers all platforms and devices. The deal will build on Kantar Media’s significant global presence and activities in digital audience measurement across all devices in 60+ countries.

Civolution will now focus on its two remaining key business areas – Its industry leading NexGuard Forensic Watermarking on one hand and Teletrax TV analytics and TV synced advertising on the other hand.

Teletrax, which leverages Civolution’s world leading broadcast monitoring infrastructure, offers a wide array of broadcast intelligence, analytics and TV data triggers. In addition to providing precise and real-time data for the digital world, Teletrax is also at the core of TV-synced ads solutions, which are revolutionizing the ad industry by bringing TV and digital together. Civolution’s TV-synced ads solution has already been integrated with Xaxis in its XaxisSync solution and the AppNexus’ Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform.

What makes Civolution's approach to analytics different to competitors?

Rights holders need to understand where, when and how their stories or programs are being used. This is a strong feature of Teletrax – TV Analytics, which continuously monitors TV channels around the world, with currently over 2,200 TV channels in more than 60 countries. The intelligence provided allows right holders to make informed business decisions based on comprehensive broadcast monitoring data.

We can also identify TV advertisements in real-time, which enables advertisers to act on them instantaneously via Teletrax – TV-Synced Ads. In short, Teletrax – TV-Synced Ads enables cross-device marketing on a global scale.

Civolution works with advertisers, agencies, trading desks and Demand-Side Platforms to boost the effectiveness of both TV and digital ad spends by creating better targeting, higher click-through rates and lower cost of conversion. It uses ad triggering technology and platforms to automatically place digital advertisements across search, banner, mobile, and social at the exact moment a TV commercial airs, enabling advertisers to dramatically improve their digital performance while seeing the direct correlation between TV placements and digital transactions. This amplifies the advertiser’s message, improves brand exposure, and ultimately increases ROI on ad spend.

In a number of countries where we offer advertisements and competitive insights, we are also pro-actively populating a fully independent ad database, which contains more than 100,000 ads from 7,000+ brands at present. Advertisers have adapted to the big-data revolution, but are often limited by legacy systems and TV industry red tape. By adopting real-time TV analytics, agencies and advertisers can integrate campaign and competitive data into their decision-making processes to get better results. Teletrax ad monitoring tracks over 7000+ brands across 17 product categories and 200+ sub-categories, to offer real-time data on competitors’ advertising activities and enable to generate competitive response.