Smarter CTV with ACR Targeting and Measurement

Audiences move between linear TV, streaming and digital environments, making it increasingly difficult for advertisers to understand who they are reaching and where ad exposure occurs across screens.

Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) helps connect these environments. Built into enabled smart TVs, ACR technology can recognise the content and advertising displayed on screen, whether it comes from broadcast television, a set-top box or a streaming service. For advertisers, this creates a view of TV viewing behaviour that can inform both targeting and measurement.

From TV data to household-level insight

Samba’s ACR technology contextually analyses what is actually playing on opted-in smart TVs, understanding viewing behaviour directly from the screen rather than relying on survey recall or a set-top-box sample.

This first-party TV data is combined with web signals through Samba’s proprietary ID, deterministically connecting people, devices, and households — the foundation of the Samba Knowledge Graph. This is calibrated against an independent research panel, weighted to be nationally representative, which lets that household-level view be projected to represent the wider population.

This provides the basis for analysing campaign exposure across TV, CTV and digital — including which households were reached by TV alone, by digital or OTT alone, and where those audiences overlap.

Turning TV viewing into smarter targeting

Understanding TV exposure can help advertisers make more informed decisions about who they reach through CTV. ACR-powered audiences can support several strategies:

• Incremental reach: identify households that have not been exposed to a linear TV campaign and reach them through CTV.
• Retargeting: engage households that have already seen a brand’s TV advertising.
• Frequency management: prioritise areas that under-index for linear TV exposure, helping manage overall campaign frequency.
• Competitive conquesting: build audiences based on exposure to competitors’ TV advertising.
• Viewing-based targeting: reach audiences based on observed TV behaviours, including the content, genres and services they watch.

This allows CTV targeting to complement an advertiser’s wider television strategy rather than operate as an isolated media buy.

Understanding reach and frequency across screens

Through Samba’s True Reach & Frequency solution, advertisers can see a deduplicated view of campaign exposure across linear TV, digital and OTT. The dashboard shows overall population reach, TV-only reach, digital/OTT-only reach and TV and digital/OTT overlap, alongside reach and average frequency by platform, impressions by device, and household reach by frequency.

Together, these data points show how much unique reach CTV added, where audiences overlapped and how frequency was distributed across the campaign. They can also support in-flight optimisation, helping advertisers identify and manage under or overexposure while activity is still running.

Bringing targeting and measurement together

The value of Samba’s media intelligence becomes particularly clear when targeting and measurement are used together. An advertiser could identify households underexposed to a linear TV campaign, target them through CTV to build incremental reach, and then measure how many additional households that activity reached.

Alternatively, delivery could be weighted towards areas that under-index for TV exposure, with measurement providing visibility into the resulting reach and frequency. This connects exposure, activation, measurement and optimisation, helping advertisers use TV and CTV together more effectively.

Campaigns powered by Rakuten TV Enterprise & Samba

Through our partnership with Samba, Rakuten TV Enterprise advertisers can access Samba-powered targeting based on TV viewing behaviour alongside deduplicated measurement of reach, frequency and exposure across TV and CTV.

Together, these capabilities provide a clearer view of where CTV adds incremental value and help advertisers make more informed decisions across their wider TV strategy.

Put ACR-powered insights to work in your next CTV campaign. Get in touch

Source: Samba.com