Nielsen Bets on Addressable TV Ads

You’ve heard TV ads are getting measurable, right? And addressable? Yeah, so have we, though the major cable operators have embraced those new adjectives with all the enthusiasm of a six-year-old staring down the bath tub.

Yet every now and then little developments bubble up (like a six-year-old’s fart in aforementioned bath tub) that suggest change is happening. One such bubble wobbled to the surface yesterday, as Nielsen announced a pairing with TV ad management firm Invidi (think Atlas or DoubleClick for television) to provide data that will improve the latter’s TV measurement system for addressable ads.

Invidi owns a piece of software that sits at the so-called head end, a facility at your local cable office where content and ads are stitched together and served to your TV. The head end, and how it regulates the joining of programming with marketing content, will define the future of television, smart people say.

With the Nielsen relationship, Invidi will be able to provide better analytics on ads targeted based on the individual characteristics of a household or community. And Nielsen aims to position itself as a necessary partner in the age of addressable TV. To that end, it recently launched a unit, DigitalPlus, to work with set top box data from cable and satellite providers.