Roku acquires Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business

Roku has announced a major deal to acquire Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business in a move which will further propel the company forward as a leader in the CTV space.

The deal, described as a strategic alliance, will see Roku purchase the AVA business including Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies. Roku said that the deal will accelerate the launch of its end-to-end DAI solution with TV programmers. 

The deal goes both ways as well, with Nielsen’s ad and content measurement products being integrated into the Roku platform. This will give Nielsen vital access to Roku’s customer data.

The announcement builds on a years-long partnership between Roku and Nielsen, with the companies entering into a long-term commercial agreement to leverage Total Ad Ratings (TAR) on the Roku platform.  Roku’s media sales and ad-buying platform, OneView, will natively integrate Nielsen “always on” Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) for advertisers. Roku will also enable publishers to implement Nielsen Digital Content Ratings (DCR).

Nielsen had previously struck deals with the likes of Disney, CBS, Discovery, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal, and it is understood that these media giants will have “renewed conversations” with Roku on addressable advertising, as per Variety.

Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku, said: “Tens of billions of dollars continue to be spent annually on traditional TV advertising. Combining 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.”

Scott N. Brown, GM, Audience Measurement, Nielsen, said: “The measurement of ads and content on Roku devices will accelerate the path to a single, deduplicated cross-media currency. As Roku brings the power of dynamic ad insertion to all forms of TV, we’re excited to help monetize the addressable market by measuring smart TV as a currency, which Nielsen can do at scale.”