TVSquared adds ‘who’ to its TV performance tracking by partnering with LiveRamp’s IdentityLink

At the beginning of this week, data onboarder LiveRamp announced that its IdentityLink service would tackle a new territory: television.

Now, TV measurement service TVSquared has announced a new partnership with LiveRamp.

For the past six years, TVSquared’s ADvantage platform has tracked the impact of 15- and 30-second advertising in linear broadcast TV on digital behaviors, working with more than 700 brands.

Let’s say Toyota runs a spot in the second ad break on NBC’s series, “This Is Us.” On a minute-by-minute basis, TVSquared is tracking the traffic to Toyota’s digital properties — such as its website, mobile website and app — and it can detect any spikes.

Cookies are dropped, and mobile device IDs are tracked, by TVSquared when visitors go to the website or app in the period around that spot’s airing.

For instance, ADvantage can tell Toyota that its national spot on “This Is Us” led to, say, a 15 percent increase in traffic to its website in that same time period.

And half of that increased traffic then went to Google, which showed a boost in searches for “Toyota minivan” around that time. TVSquared assigns probabilities to whether given actions, such as search spikes, have been driven by the TV ad airing around that time.

Now, the ‘who’

LiveRamp’s IdentityLink matches the cookie or mobile device ID tracked by TVSquared with another cookie on the same computer — or the same mobile device ID — in LiveRamp’s database of profiles.

Once that match is made, the IdentityLink profile uses a persistent identifier, like that user’s email address, to connect an outside data set to that visitor.

In other words, TVSquared can now tell how many women, of what ages and what income brackets, drove that spike in traffic so that Toyota can target them.

Before, TVSquared Chief Strategy Officer Kevin O’Reilly said, TVSquared had been reporting on the “what, when and how” about TV spots impacting digital performance.

With LiveRamp’s IdentityLink identity resolution service, he said, his company is adding “who.” While LiveRamp can’t match every visitor, O’Reilly said it can match the majority, so there is more than enough of a sample to make generalizations.

Siloed data

TVSquared can now report back to Toyota that, for instance, a majority of the lift in traffic to its website during the time period surrounding the ad broadcast was female, with most aged 35-50 and having family incomes greater than $100,000.

The IdentityLink match with the TVSquared cookie/mobile device ID is conducted in real time, which is followed up by a report within 24 hours on the demographics of the traffic.

Now, for the first time, TVSquared can also track across devices. IdentityLink knows that, in addition to the laptop where TVSquared dropped a cookie for this User 123, that same user also owns a smartphone with this mobile device ID, which might show up on the website later in the same program airing. By knowing this, TVSquared knows the later visit is the same person.

O’Reilly says that each client company’s data remains siloed for its own use, so the expanded profiles of visitors to Toyota’s website during the ad broadcasts are available only to Toyota.

The additional brand-specific data — such as “this user visited a site for Toyota” — does not return to IdentityLink. If the same person goes to a Kellogg’s website in an hour, it’s a completely different profile that is expanded with IdentityLink’s data.

[Article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.