Commmonality Is Key: Samba TV’s Ackerman
Commmonality Is Key: Samba TV’s Ackerman

SAN JUAN, PR -- The ad industry needs to start talking the same language and cooperating on data sharing if all players are going to elevate to meet the opportunity of advanced targeting techniques.

That is according to Dan Ackerman, Samba TV chief revenue officer.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ackerman talks about the importance of standards, agreements and common alignment.

"The ability to connect mobile ad IDs, cookies before they disappear, IP address and then legacy identifiers ... being able to pull that all together, if you don't have that infrastructure, it's going to be very difficult to have a comprehensive view of the behaviour across the different platforms," Ackerman says.

San Francisco-based Samba was set up to help advertisers and broadcasters know, with certainty, which TV shows viewers were watching, for how long and how attentive they were.

Launched in 2008 and backed by investors including Mark Cuban, the outfit works by having software embedded on millions of viewing devices via app makers which bundle Samba’s recommendation features.

Its dataset is collected from now over 20 different television brands globally, from over 25 million opted-in households, including 10 different manufacturers in the US.

"Getting everyone to agree to be transparent," Ackerman adds.

"You have to have a buyer and a seller agree to it.

So I think if the underlying data is representative, it's privacy compliant and it does have the connectivity to all of the different platforms, it's a good starting point.

"So at least you're starting with something that doesn't have big bias or big black holes in it.

Whether it's transparency of how you manage it or how you collect it, or the way that it connects across different platforms." The interview was conducted by Ashley J.

Swartz, CEO of Furious Corp.

This video was produced  at the Beet Retreat San Juan 2020 sponsored by 605, DISH Media, NBCU, Roundel & Tubi.

For more videos from the series, please visit this landing page.