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AdUnion launches TV attribution platform with precise ‘cost-per-sale’ metric

Melbourne-based advertising agency AdUnion is aiming to simplify the process of measuring the effectiveness of TV ads via a new TV attribution platform for advertisers.

Mumbrella can reveal the platform will provide advertisers with a clearer cost-per-sale metric for high-impact and high-value Connected TV (CTV) buying.

Connected TV and BVOD have developed into hot topics within the television advertising space, but there continues to be disagreement over media strategies, with buyers reluctant to take more of the pie away from tried and test linear TV advertising.

AdUnion cofounder Adam Shalagin

AdUnion’s new platform has a simple, but important proposition.

“I can show a TV ad, and I can actually show a cost per sale against that. That’s the big thing for advertisers,” co-founder Adam Shalagin tells Mumbrella.

The launch of the platform comes at a time when getting exact matches for the impact of and has proven difficult in a cookieless environment like CTV.

“We can measure precisely what’s going on with devices like a PC, laptop, or a phone, because there’s tracking in place to do that because people are usually watching through a browser or through an app.

“One of the difficulties of Connected TV is that it is cookieless, and not an interactive device. The combination of those two things means we need to consider how to understand if someone’s actually seen an ad and acted.”

Other solutions in market at the moment, including Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), have high rates of error, Shalagin explains.

“Being able to make that connection is something that people have tried to do before, like how DSPs create a picture of what a household looks like, they’re trying to connect a TV to an iPad, to a laptop, to a mobile phone.

“But the error rate is quite large. We’ve been running programmatic activity for a decade now, and match rates are really low. So it’s not really reliable output.”

Shalagin says that initial ideas for the platform came about as a result of discussions around a client who had a specific issue with increasing their budget to buy CTV.

“We know we should be using it. We know 80% of Australians are using BVOD, and we should have around a third of our budget pointed towards it, but how can we measure it?”

AdUnion then went about collating datasets to find information like how many times viewers are seeing ads, and how long it takes from the first impression for a viewer to interact with the brand.

“It was really born from a problem of being able to measure what is effectively a digital media. One of our clients, now a beta partner, was in the tech sector. That allowed us to workshop this with them and find and overcome problems.

“Their knowledge of what’s happening online as well as our understanding of the ad ecosystem allowed us to find the solution.”

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