IRVINE, Calif.—In a sign of a strong connected TV ad market, Vizio has announced that it concluded its upfront season with more than $200 million in direct advertising commitments from agency holding companies, brands and studios.

The figure marks a 100% year-over-year increase, Vizio said and comes on the heels of a 71% year over year increase in ad revenue in Q2, 2022.

The TV interface is the new battleground for consumer attention and with the advancements of new technologies, TV now holds the promise of becoming a new playground in the home. In an exclusive fireside chat, Mike O’Donnell, VIZIO’s Chief Revenue Officer, sits down with TVREV’s Alan Wolk to discuss how making TVs and owning the interface is unlocking innovation for programmers, advertisers and the broader ecosystem to create an engaging and exciting time for consumers.

Working in partnership with BIA Advisory Services, Madhive -- which supports the programmatic space -- released the report to reveal the opportunities around OTT and its adoption.

“We give content to customers how they want it,” VP of digital distribution and business development at FilmRise Daniel Gagliardi said. “We have our own apps that sit on devices like Vizio, we have our own FAST channels that we program … the idea really is make it easy for customers to let them watch and single series is a way to do that.”

One way is through single show linear channels, which solely air episodes from a particular TV show. These types of channels help viewers familiarize themselves with AVOD and FAST, noted Greg Barnard, director of content acquisition at Vizio.

“We’re essentially trying to generate a new behavior in the consumer,” he said at a Thursday panel. “FAST is new, AVOD on a streaming platform is new. What a single series IP channel does is it generates that behavior more seamlessly.”

Starz has also signed an agreement with Sony that allows the former to air Sony’s popular films like Venom and Spider-Man: No Way Home and many others on its platform. It recently launched a deal with VIZIO in the United States, making Starz available to millions of VIZIO Smart TV users.

In addition to Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram, other investors participating in the seed round include D4 Ventures, Esas Ventures, Paragon Ventures and 23 Fund. Individual investors include Commencis’ Firat and Fatih Isbecer, Livspace’s Ramakant Sharma, Tubular Labs’ Rob Gabel and additional executives and investors from Amazon, Apple, DoorDash, Goldman Sachs, Silverlake and SoftBank.

TV set manufacturers' automatic content recognition (ACR) data, from Samsung, LG, Vizio, for example, are in the sights of TV advertisers and media agency pros. And Adam Gerber, executive director, U.S. investment strategy at GroupM, wants changes.

Samsung Ads: 42 million opted-in devices; Vizio, 19 million smart TV opted-in devices; and LG Ads Solutions, 20 million smart TV addressable U.S. homes. A rough potential of 81 million smart TV homes/devices in the making. That would be a good start.

Tim Glomb, VP of Content and Data at Cheetah Digital and Chris Muscutt, Head of MarTech at PepsiCo, recently discussed their take on the use of zero- and first-party data and technology to power effective strategies.
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To remain competitive in today’s signal-saturated world, brands need to deliver relevant, personalized content throughout the customer journey. According to a new e-Consultancy report, in partnership with Cheetah Digital, entitled ‘2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index: Consumer Attitudes and Trends in Personalization, Privacy, Messaging, Advertising and Brand Loyalty’, consumers are rewarding brands that make personalization a priority. In fact, more than half of the respondents shared that they would trade personal and preference data to feel part of a brand’s community.

Among the 74% of U.S. TV households who own a smart TV, 88% of them use the native TVOS in that device to stream video.

And according to Hub Entertainment Research, among that latter group, 56% use Samsung's Tizen OS.

Roku (44%) ranks second, followed by LG's webOS (38%), Amazon Fire TV (29%), Android TV (28%) and Vizio SmartCast (21%).

One of the benefits of CTV for political advertising is the ability to more narrowly target, including based on interest, as described in a recent report by TVREV analysts on political ads in the streaming CTV space. Written by TVREV co-founder and lead analyst Alan Wolk, the report noted that if the goal is to reach a voter on cable with more left-leaning views, the best option for linear is “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC and then work to find other shows that index high against that program’s viewers or viewers in a specific demo.

“Either way, you are going to get a lot of waste,” TVREV states. “On streaming, however, you can reach viewers who frequently watch Maddow by running ads on others shows they watch.”

“The problem you have with measurement at the glass-level is that none of them are working together," he explained, adding, "My action call to the industry would be to get Samsung, get Vizio, get LG, get Sony, and get all the others to understand that their ACR data is not a competitive strategic asset for them. It’s only valuable if they pool it in a national footprint of data for advertisers and sellers to use and understand."

This makes email a relatively inexpensive method of marketing at scale for businesses. In fact, according to Campaign Monitor, nearly 60% of small businesses surveyed in 2021 planned to increase their spending on email marketing campaigns in the future. Email marketing is an excellent tool for any business looking to cast a wide net with a small budget.

But what many don’t realize is that, thanks to our partnership with VIZIO’s Inscape, iSpot can also measure TV viewership for all of linear, including VOD and time-shifted viewing. And with our newly announced partnership with Conviva, we’re excited to make program viewing on Smart TV apps, mobile and desktop a part of our Unified Measurement solution.

Via Inscape, Vizio’s TV data product with glass-level insights from a panel of more than 19 million active and opted-in smart TVs. Data is linear, live TV only and includes all episode types (new and reruns). Rankings are by percent share duration (i.e., time spent watching).

Week two action guided the NFL to the top spot in our watch-time ranking for Sept. 12-18. Even with the Thursday night game streaming on Amazon Prime instead of broadcast or cable, the league’s games still accounted for 6.78% of minutes watched (down just slightly from 7.16% in week one).

Vizio was one of the first companies to introduce smart TVs, and it remains one of the most popular brands in the U.S. The company’s products are available through retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart, as well as Vizio’s online store. Vizio’s HDTVs have built-in SmartCast technology that lets users stream video content from apps such as Netflix, Prime Video, and Hulu. Vizio also offers SmartCast-enabled sound bars, sound systems, and other audio equipment. Vizio’s competitive advantage is its wide product assortment. The company’s TVs come in various screen sizes, resolutions, and price points. Vizio also offers a variety of add-on devices, such as sound bars and streaming media players.

My friend and colleague Alan Wolk does a good job surveying the 1,000 Reasons for Angst in traditional TV, from diminishing economic prospects for creatives to the uncertain future of affiliates to, oh yeah, whether the broadcast networks can still make money. True, the puckish lads at LightShed Partners are calling it a “death spiral,” but hope abides for a late-life revival.

The report cited the case of smart-TV maker Vizio, which struck a multimillion-dollar agreement to settle FTC allegations that it had enabled a default setting that allowed the company to collect and share TV-viewing activity with third parties, but did so without sufficient notice to consumers, including by giving the setting the vague, pro-consumer sounding name of “Smart Interactivity.”

“If you’re thinking about where to really run your political dollars and engage with key demos, you probably should be thinking about us,” notes Nyma Quidwai, VIZIO’s Senior Director of Client Services. “VIZIO gives you a highly engaged political audience. Just take a look at some of the stats — 87% of VIZIO viewers identify with a political party, 75% of VIZIO TVs watched news content in the last year, which is 32% more than the 2020 election cycle. Beyond that, we're seeing 38% of Vizio TVs are in households located in key swing states, which is where the bulk of this year’s political spending is happening.”