What is ACR Data?
Smart TVs Are Creepy, but They Can Also Provide Invaluable Data
Picture this: Joe and his rival, Bob, are in a fierce competition to win the hearts of the town with their prize vegetables. Joe goes traditional, putting up billboards saying, "Joe's Pumpkins are the Best!" Bob goes techy and uses Smart Billboards that change depending on who's driving by.
Now, imagine if your TV was like Bob's billboard, adapting and learning from your patterns. This isn’t so far-fetched: If you have a smart TV, it’s pretty regularly spying on (or learning from) you. That can be unsettling for folks, but it has at least one benefit. While pretty much everything is getting more expensive these days, the cost of TVs has plummeted 97% since the year 20001.
Why is that? It’s because TV manufacturers have an entirely new product—their profits don’t come from the physical product themselves, but from you. ACR data (short for Automated Content Recognition) collected on each user is far more valuable than any TV sale2. In the same way that your phone apps can identify your interests and serve you ads, your TV can detect what programs you’re watching and record that information to sell to advertisers and other groups. Companies buy this information to make sure they show ads that you'd want to see and might actually take action on.
The data that our TVs are collecting can be really useful for advertisers, especially those trying to reach specific age groups and demographics. Of the folks still glued to traditional TV, 75% are over the age of 50! And 18-to-34-year-olds? Only about 10% are watching traditional TV, while 54% are streaming their shows. Just the top 40% of TV-watching households are consuming 90% of the traditional TV content—so if regular cable and broadcast ads are your primary method of communication, you’re missing huge swaths of people!3
For larger campaigns, we can also get very detailed analytics from ACR data. As an example, if we are in a high turnout Presidential year and ACR data shows us over 65 folks are seeing our ads 22 times per week, but under 30 folks are only seeing ads 5 times per week, we need to adjust. Even when we account for differences in turnout, this ACR data would help us adjust spending. An adjustment that moves more money to younger folks and changes our media mix would increase our odds of winning by reaching all the right voters with the appropriate saturation.
Overall, TVs are getting smarter, cheaper, and also quite nosy. ACR data is making ads more personal, yet more more intrusive, and simultaneously allowing advertisers to run detailed and highly targeted ad campaigns in a brand new way.
The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs, The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/smart-tvs-sony-lg-cheap/672614/
What TV Advertisers Need to Know about ACR Data, Ad Exchanger, www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/what-tv-advertisers-need-to-know-about-acr-in-2023/
IQM Internal Data, Watch Data, www.iqm.com