Not for attribution. It’s for exposure. If Pepsi buys $1M in ads on NBC, it only knows the DMA and time slot/programs it bought the ads on. It doesn’t know the households it bought the ads on. With ACR data, it will know that you were exposed. From there, they can do a few different things. Audience studies (like they reached 2000 households with a certain income etc). Or they can run attribution studies. A company called Data+Math looks at exposure of these kinds of ads, understands which households weren’t exposed (as a control) and gives statistically significance calculations on linear TV ads to understand lift of sales (one example).
Inscape, an ACR company, have this revealing paragraph on their blog. Note the "following your IP from the exposure to the ad, to the sales funnel" part:
"Advertisers like ACR data because it provides second-by-second feedback on how their ads are performing. Nielsen provides its data in 15-minute blocks, so if viewers tuned out after the first ad in a pod, the advertiser has no way of knowing. And since IP addresses are included, companies like iSpot.tv and Data + Math are able to use that information to create multi-touch attribution ratings that help advertisers understand how certain ads and placements helped move viewers through the sales funnel, from seeing the ad, to googling the product to actually buying it. It’s a lengthy process that requires a lot of data and a lot of rigor, but it’s an excellent way to prove to marketers that TV advertising actually works."
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What's funny about this is that I think this is a legitimate and relatively non-evil use case.
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- parent is saying that fingerprinting so the advertisers know who saw the ads is legitimate and relatively non-evil.
It all comes down to lack of transparency/oversight and the option to exercise control as an individual.
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- parent acknowledges that not telling the user and not making it configurable can be problematic.
If you consider tracking an anonymous identifier for the purposes of better marketing "spying" then I think that's a stretch. Calling out TV in particular for it is a bit silly - it's simply everywhere.
"...without their consent and without telling them about it."
Yes they are. You opt in or out when you buy the TV. They tell you about it then. You can be like most people and not read the fine print, but then don't be all surprised when someone's pulling the wool over your eyes.
I can't fathom the math and scale involved here making sense in the long term.
Eventually the marginal increase in profit is less than the marginal increase in adtech cost. I wouldn't be surprised if many industries passed that point years ago. There's probably a lot of hype and hubris disguising that fact, but someone's going to make a successful business case out of cheap, low-creepiness spray-and-pray advertising.
Depends on the manufacturer. Some use it to get you to use their other services. Some use it for second screen apps. Others for various on-screen info. Not sure of all use cases. I don't think the data was ever used for targeted tracking.
