As the CTV/OTT political ad market matures, the name of the game now is exclusive offerings whether that’s in terms of inventory or data.
Basis Technologies believes they’ve found their hook with an “exclusive partnership” with LG Ad Solutions unveiled last week that’ll give the platform company’s clients access to inventory on LG TVs for the 2024 cycle.
Basis clients also get access to LG’s “proprietary automatic content recognition (ACR) data for targeting and measurement,” according to Basis. Both companies have sales teams that will be working the phones going into 2024.
“From their end, they were very interested in having a partner that could offer self-serve opportunities for clients,” said Basis VP Grace Briscoe, who noted that “hands-on-keyboard” is increasingly à la mode in the space.
LG, which previously hadn’t had an exclusive arrangement with a political ad vendor, was also attracted to Basis’ longevity in the space.
“It gave them some assurance that while they’re enabling that self-serve access that political advertisers want, they also know it’s high quality, reputable political advertisers and that we do a whole creative screening process that involves human screening on our end,” Briscoe said.
She called it a marriage of premium inventory with premium advertisers.
In addition to the premium inventory available through the hardware maker’s ad platform, Briscoe said the ACR data is also a selling point. “The ACR data is going to allow us to do off-the-shelf turnkey things for reaching cord cutters [and] no-linear [or] low-linear households, if you just want that incremental reach buy off of your linear TV buy.”
Another one of the other features includes targeting audiences exposed to opposition advertising — a practice called “conquesting” in commercial advertising. It’s a variation of a tool that competitors are also highlighting in their latest offerings. For instance, The Trade Desk’s new partnership with Proximic offers clients to “target based off of competitive investment.”
“Two cycles ago, you could only do that for the presidential,” Briscoe said. “There just wasn’t the scale in aggregated data to really break it down on and scale those buys. Now, I think with the explosion of connected TV viewership and penetration it is much more scalable.”
