Dentsu Unveils Bespoke Allocation System Tied To VideoAmp Currency, Has Deals With 7 TV Suppliers

Editor's Note: This story has been updated from an earlier version that incorrectly reported DELTA is Dentsu's new currency, not its allocation system utilizing VideoAmp as its linear TV advertising market currency.

Dentsu has struck deals with seven major media companies to do deals on the basis of its own, proprietary media allocation system, Dentsu Senior Vice President U.S. National Video Innovation Brad Stockton said during a presentation at the Advertising Research Foundation's CIMM (Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) in New York City Wednesday afternoon.

Importantly, Stockton said the deals aren’t just with the biggest players, such as NBC Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, which have been pushing the adoption of alternative advertising currencies, but smaller network suppliers, including Hallmark and A+E networks.

Stockton said the new system began as an RFI (request for information) process in 2020 before historic TV ad currency Nielsen even lost its Media Rating Council accreditation, and the horse race among alternative currency providers began to ramp up.

Stockton said the goal was to integrate Dentsu's proprietary audience databases -- Merkle's Merkury and M1 audience profiles -- into a new market currency that could be used for negotiations, and that the result is Dentsu is able to plan, and allocate linear TV advertising buys based on its bespoke audience profiles, and negotiate guaranteed schedules with TV networks utilizing VideoAmp's audience estimates as the transactional currency.

Stockton also revealed plans to introduce a version of DELTA next year that will enable the agency to do the same thing for CTV advertising buys utilizing streaming data as the currency.

Stockton said that system, dubbed DELTA+, is still in development, but the goal is to utilize the first-party data provided by streaming services as the "source of truth" for those advertising buys.

Importantly, he said that while both DELTA and DELTA+ are designed to utilize Dentsu's proprietary audience data, the agency can also work with a client's own, first-party audience data or other third-party sources if they want.

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