Upwave recently launched an enhanced suite of Connected Television (CTV) measurement capabilities. The two cornerstones of the enhancements are a new Targeting Verification technology and expanded scale of the Upwave Digital Network. These additions complement Upwave’s industry-leading Brand Outcome cross-channel measurement, which analyzes the precise brand impact of advertising campaigns.
Targeting Verification
Targeting Verification allows marketers to confirm whether they are reaching their target audience when running CTV and other cross-channel video campaigns. Targeting Verification confirms the percentage of a campaign that truly reaches a specific behavioral and/or demographic segment across CTV, linear and digital video channels.
As CTV advertising continues to grow in importance, advertisers have demanded better tools to measure the effectiveness of their efforts. Most significantly, marketers have struggled to confirm whether their advertisements were actually viewed by their intended audience—the granular personas that a brand targets. Marketers have complained about the lack of transparency of the targeted end users for both programmatic and publisher direct buys. Targeting Verification is the first solution to this problem, providing full transparency into the delivery of all target audiences, even including custom audiences and personas targeted by only one brand. These analytics are delivered for both programmatic and direct-buy campaigns, across all channels.
Expanded Scale
Upwave has also observed that while measurement requests for CTV campaigns have increased by over 500% year over year on its platform, the ability to measure smaller campaigns has remained a challenge, resulting in a significant portion of CTV campaigns going unmeasured. In response, Upwave has doubled the scale of the Upwave Digital Network, which provides a proprietary data set of consumers’ reactions to advertisements. This increase in scale has lowered the threshold for minimum campaign size to 2.5 million impressions, enabling Upwave to activate its leading measurement platform across even more CTV spend. Upwave offers the lowest CTV impression threshold in the industry.
Scott Symonds, Managing Partner, Media, at AKQA commented, “As advertisers invest more in cross-channel video campaigns, they are demanding evidence these campaigns truly build their brands. So it’s critical for data-driven agencies to not only support cross-channel measurement of brand outcomes, but also show which behavioral segments are actually being reached in each channel. At AKQA, we believe a big part of the competitive advantage we drive for our clients is the next-level audience confirmation, insight, and activation we deploy to our campaign managers. Upwave’s Targeting Verification is cutting-edge in this regard, and we consider it our ‘secret weapon’ in audience analytics.”
Upwave Investor Jonah Goodhart, an ad verification pioneer who was previously Founder and CEO at Moat (now part of Oracle Data Cloud), added, “As data targeting has become commonplace in digital advertising, many marketers are asking how they can verify they are actually reaching their intended audiences. Upwave’s Targeting Verification solution is the first of its kind and an important step for any marketer who uses data-driven targeting to ensure they are reducing waste and getting what they are paying for.”
“CTV is now in the position digital was in ten years ago. Marketers are turning to it with increasing frequency, and they’re asking for proof that their investments are paying off,” says Chris Kelly, CEO of Upwave. “They are tired of flying blind, so are demanding proof their CTV ads reached the right people and drove those people down the brand funnel. And they want this measurement on all CTV campaigns, not just their largest ones.”
Targeting Verification and the expanded network will be available to Upwave customers immediately.