On Tuesday, ViacomCBS announced they would be launching EyeQ later this fall. The platform will enable marketers to buy connected video ads across its premium digital video content.
The takeaways:
- The platform will serve as a single transaction point for all of the company’s video assets including CBS TV network, CBS Sports HQ, Comedy Central, BET, MTV, Pluto TV, CBS All Access, Nickelodeon, and more.
- Advertisers will be able to transact in multiple ways and can segment their campaigns by genre (e.g sports, entertainment), demographics, customer behavior, and other custom preferences.
- The ViamcomCBS digital video network will enable advertisers to access 50 million full-episode monthly unique viewers in the U.S., and 150 million across all content and all devices.
The pitch: ViamcomCBS view EyeQ as a game-changing move that will position them strongly as ad buys increasing becomes more programmatic.
- “ViacomCBS can now offer unified buying and frequency control [to reach 50 million full-episode monthly users], which is aligned to the needs of an advertising marketplace that is increasingly focused on incremental reach,” said David Lawenda, EVP of Digital Sales and Strategy at ViacomCBS.
- “In unifying the operating backend and go-to-market of three large pre-existing players – CBS Interactive, Pluto TV, and Viacom Video – we have consolidated a massive audience footprint that will deliver quality, scale, and capabilities that cannot be matched,” said John Halley, COO of Advertising Revenue at ViacomCBS.
Programmatic moves in-house: This is yet another foray into the AdTech market for publishers. Along with Comcast and Charter, Viacom CBS announced they would take co-ownership of Blockgraph, an identity layer for the TV industry focused on using secure, anonymized audience data.
- Discovery Inc. announced OneGraph in July – a unified ad platform powered by LiveRamp.
- NBCUniversal’s One Platform, which launched earlier this year, seeks to combine linear and digital TV ad buying.
- Walt Disney Co. after merging Hulu into its ads sales team announced it has plans to build a unified ad platform.
What’s next: ViacomCBS will launch a single ad server management and reporting infrastructure tool next year. Currently, CBS uses Google Ad Manager, while Viacom uses Comcast’s Freewheel.
