Roku and Nielsen announced a “strategic alliance” today. Roku will acquire Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business. This includes Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) tech. Roku says this will accelerate their launch of “an end-to-end DAI solution with TV programmers.”
Also, both firms are entering into a strategic partnership to integrate Nielsen ad and content measurement into the Roku platform. This will advance Nielsen’s ONE cross media measurement solution. Nielsen ONE provides publishers a single, unduplicated number of their audience across platforms and mediums. The collaboration will “substantially expand the footprint of smart TVs and other devices, nearing 100 million in total, in which Nielsen can enable media sellers and buyers to measure and better monetize addressable advertising.”
The companies already have been collaborating over the years. For example, Roku has utilized Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings and Digital Content Ratings services.
“Tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent annually on traditional TV advertising. Nielsen’s AVA technology with Roku’s innovative ad tech and scale will enable us to deliver the benefits of TV streaming advertising to traditional TV. Roku will bring the promise of DAI to the market for the first time ever at scale — providing better targeting and measurement for advertisers, creating easy integration and additional revenue opportunities for programmers’ ad sales teams, and improving the TV experience for viewers. We’re also excited to become a key strategic partner for Nielsen in their new cross-media measurement products, and jointly drive toward greater transparency and accuracy in TV streaming measurement.”
Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku
The Roku-Nielsen transaction is expected to close in Q2 2021. Roku says they look forward to welcoming Nielsen AVA employees and taking ownership of an extensive portfolio of foundational ACR and DAI patents. Roku TV models, which are powered by the No. 1 selling TV OS in the U.S. in 2020, already include ACR today, and will include DAI in the near future.
