Sean Muller of iSpot Announces a Partnership with Neustar

For Muller, Neustar offers "market leadership in identity resolution and marketing analytics with dominance in digital multi-touch attribution, media-mixed modeling and data security for the world's largest brands," while his company, iSpot, "is the market leader for real-time TV advertising intelligence, with products built on granular second-by-second ad occurrence data enabling decision making for 40% of the TV ad market on a daily basis.  Its business outcome analytics are increasingly used by networks and brands as a secondary currency."  And Neustar, Muller noted, is one of only two companies in the industry to do attribution on Facebook.

Charlene Weisler:  How will this partnership blend the two companies' unique capabilities?

Sean Muller:  This is an integration of best-in-breed digital multi-touch and granular TV ad attribution.  Technology integrations just completed, the Neustar and iSpot IDS have already been matched and synchronized.  All of iSpot's measurement across 12k advertisers is flowing to Neustar, and offline data flows from Neustar to iSpot's dashboard

Weisler:  How does this partnership enhance business opportunities?

Muller:  In many ways, the marketplace brought us together for a unified solution.  We found major CPG, auto makers and retailers and financial service companies were combining our capabilities for a unified, granular view into performance across customer channels.  By integrating, we're making it easier for brands to have a unified solution.  The implementation is done.  Clients can take advantage today.

Weisler:  Are there any overlaps?  If so, how will they be handled?

Muller:  The technologies and capabilities are very complimentary for brands wanting unified attribution with granularity on all ends.  While overlap in capabilities are to be expected, KPIs and frameworks for managing customer touch points vary by industry and customer, so overlaps will be resolved by a true focus on delivering the best solution for the brand customer.

Weisler:  Are there any gaps still to be filled?  If so, what are they and how would they be filled?

Muller:  True and absolute unification will always have a distance to travel because there are brand exposures and influences that are impossible to always count, such as in-person recommendation, subtle out-of-home and unmarked social influencer content integrations.  This is the most complete unification technology suite on the market today full stop.

Weisler:  Both companies offer attribution.  How will processes be handled/merged/standardized (if they going to do so)?

Muller:  Each company will retain its attribution and performance scoring systems and methodology.  However, with data flowing more seamlessly between platforms, customers will be able to go deeper into things such as creative performance and time of day.  The two will look to evolve offerings down the road beyond that.

Weisler:  From an overall media ecosystem perspective, what are still the biggest challenges for buyers and sellers out there?

Muller:  The biggest problem for the broader ecosystem revolves around quality, accuracy, scale and trust.  The abundance of big, raw data sets and proliferation of analytics boutiques has given rise to low quality, low cost attribution services that are just plain risky as a means for making decisions.  So the big challenges are educating the advertisers and media buyers on the importance of data fidelity, quality and consistency and giving brands the tools to properly leverage the insights to generate more revenues, cost savings and so forth.

Weisler:  How will your partnership meet those challenges?

Muller:  Together with leading brands, iSpot and Neustar are developing best practice guidelines other brands can use to make informed decisions when thinking about connecting ad investments to attribution or other analysis.

Weisler:  Where do you see the ecosystem going and the role of this partnership three years from now?

Muller:  The movement towards outcome-based buying, optimization and performance guarantees in TV will continue to accelerate.

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