TV Owners of OpenAP Make Pitch to Move Ad Dollars to New Measurements

variety.com:

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorTV’s battle for new yardsticks isn’t over yet.The TV companies that own ad-tech firm OpenAP intend to make a pitch at Cannes to get advertisers to move their dollars to new kinds of measurement technologies — just as the networks are trying to roll out alternate audience-tabulation systems to Nielsen, which still sets the main currency upon which most ad deals are based.Open AP is owned by Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery, which will push advertisers to “shift real dollars from panels to census,” says Brittany Slattery, chief marketing officer at OpenAP.Despite the networks’ best efforts, Nielsen remains an integral part of the audience-measurement mix.

In April, the Fox-owned streaming outlet Tubi said it plans to expand its relationship with Nielsen to help advertisers measure viewing of Tubi programming across a wider array of venues.

The networks and OpenAP will hold a summit devoted to the topic of advanced advertising on Thursday, June 23. Companies joining the event will include Amobee, EDO Comscore, Innovid, iSpot, LiveRamp, Magnite, Nielsen, VideoAmp, SambaTV, TransUnion and Truthset.Since launching in 2017 under the auspices of WarnerMedia’s Turner, the former Viacom Inc.

and the Fox Networks Group of the former 21st Century Fox, Open AP has tried to facilitate the increasingly common practice of “audience buying” among advertisers.