Data and measurement firm Samba TV is selling its media sales business to U.K.-based MiQ in a deal the San Francisco-based firm said will enable it to focus on “defining the future of TV measurement.”
The company said in a statement Friday that it will “transition” its managed media services to MiQ as part of a “multi-year commercial partnership.”
No terms of the deal were announced.
Samba uses television technology to provide real-time insight, measurement and audience targeting. It pulls data from tens of millions of televisions across 20 brands sold in over 100 countries and claims to provide a deeper view into viewer behavior than more traditional measures.
Samba and MiQ said the deal will enable them to work together, but MiQ will run the sales operations that are changing hands. No layoffs will result, the companies said.
“We are excited to be entering into a long-term strategic partnership with MiQ, one of the leading media partners to brands and agencies globally,” said Samba TV Co-founder and CEO Ashwin Navin. “Today’s announcement reinforces our strategic focus on the next generation of currency-grade measurement and media optimization for our partners across every screen, platform, and channel. Marketers and media vendors who leverage our TV data and measurement portfolio see us as their trusted source of truth for media performance without bias for our own media.”
Nielsen, the traditional audience tracker, added streaming data from connected TVs to its media planning service last year, but the embattled company is facing more competition from cross-platform rivals, and sellers in the advertising industry have lost faith in the stalwart’s data. Critics say that its ratings systems are antiquated compared to the digital advances from others.
Nielsen, which still dominates ratings, was sold last year for $16 billion to private equity, about half what it was worth just six years earlier.
According to eMarketer, linear TV accounted for 71% of U.S. video advertising spend in 2020. It fell to 62% in 2021 and was projected to slide to 57% in 2022.
Budgets are following viewers to CTV, which eMarketer expects will pull in $26.92 billion in ads this year, or 7.3% of total ad spending, up from 5.4% in 2021.
“With CTV spending projected to exceed $20 billion this year, marketers need persistent access to TV data in order to realize the benefits of holistic TV investment,” said MiQ Co-founder and Global Executive Chairman Gurman Hundal.
“Samba TV has long been a major player in the TV data space, and we are thrilled to partner with them to offer our clients scaled and diversified TV data that drives leading Advanced TV activations and analytics solutions,” Hundal continued. “By combining our programmatic media expertise with their media services business, we will give our clients unmatched Advanced TV data access and bridge TV investment into full omnichannel treatment in ways they never could before.”
Earlier this week, Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and TelevisaUnivision said they are teaming up with advanced advertising firm OpenAP and the Video Advertising Bureau to establish a new Joint Industry Committee to establish a certification process for cross-platform measurement and bring a range of measurement and data alternatives to the market by the 2024 upfronts.
