• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, May 17, 2017

Ashish Chordia, founder and CEO, Alphonso, is a serial entrepreneur who’s also a great supporter of start-ups and mentorship. His current company was launched four years ago by eight founders from Bell Labs and VideoSurf (recently acquired by Microsoft) who have deep backgrounds in the automatic content recognition (ACR) space.  

Alphonso, according to Chordia, “collects real-time TV viewership data on a second by second basis for TV ads and shows being watched for live TV, DVR and OTT content.”

Charlene Weisler: Tell me more about Alphonso.

Ashish Chordia: We deliver one-on-one TV audiences on mobile and Web, at scale and across premium apps and sites. Through our partnerships with smart TVs, living room devices and mobile apps, we understand what people are watching on TV — and in real time, deliver this audience on mobile apps and Web sites. Currently, our technology is being used by a majority of Fortune 100 brands to run TV-targeted digital campaigns and get granular closed-loop attribution on TV spend.

Weisler: So are you competing with Nielsen on some level?

Chordia: Alphonso does not directly compete with Nielsen, as we do not have a ratings product. Nielsen has had a panel-based measurement approach for decades and they provide currency in the form of ratings. Without ratings networks, agencies and advertisers won't have a common basis to transact on. Nielsen is an enabler that way.

We are not focused on creating a currency or rating system. Instead, we focus on delivering digital quality insights on TV campaigns. We enable granular and sophisticated measurement for closed-loop attribution for TV spend by mapping real-time TV viewership to off-line data sets.

For example, for a large retailer, we can tell what is the impact of TV spend to drive people to retail or to drive purchase of certain items in store. We enable this measurement across many verticals such as auto, retail, telco, insurance, financial services, etc.

Weisler: How are you connecting the data from all of the different platforms?

Chordia: The key data set that we collect is anonymous digital IDs, such as IDFAs/AdId, that enable us to map real-time TV viewership from various devices to other data sets — both third party and the brand’s own CRM data sets.  

Weisler: What metrics do you use to measure cross-platform?

Chordia: Alphonso measures impact of TV and TV + digital by evaluating three main metrics a) engagement across platforms both TV and digital; b) lift in brand metric measured independently with one of the large research companies across both TV and digital; and c) measure of impact of TV and TV + digital both with off-line data sets such as location data, credit card purchase, policy bind, car sales, etc.