• by Joe Mandese , February 20, 2017

A promising “watermarking” technology that would bind the ad industry’s Ad-IDs with commercials and the programming content they run in has passed an important technical hurdle and is moving toward becoming an industry standard.

The method, an audio watermarking technology developed by WPP’s Kantar Media unit, has been selected by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to move on to the next stage of standardization, which would effectively make it the “UPC code” for media.

Kantar’s solution grew out of a request from SMPTE and the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) to develop a watermarking solution that would enable advertisers, agencies and the media industry to bind their assets with the ad industry’ Ad-ID codes, enabling everyone to track and traffic them end-to-end.