Updated August 7 9:30 a.m.
Bell Media has chosen a new technology partner to measure advertising viewability across its digital media properties. Rather than choosing an industry stalwart like Nielsen, it has gone with Moat, a newer generation ad tech company that’s gaining a lot of traction with its advanced audience measurement and verification techniques.
The deal marks one of the first big moves made by new Bell Media president of sales Stuart Garvie since taking over from Mary Anne Turcke last month. Garvie was previously chief commercial officer of GroupM Canada, and is no doubt familiar with advertisers’ growing demand to know how often their ads can be seen.
“Buyer confidence is extremely important to us and we are 100% committed to delivering the highest quality inventory and transparency in the market,” he said in a statement about the deal. “Partnering with the Moat team to deliver industry-leading brand intelligence and analytics to our clients is a natural fit, so we can offer additional analysis and update campaigns based on viewability scores.”
Moat’s brand analytics software is quickly becoming the standard for Canadian media companies. Olive Media, which represents Torstar digital properties, announced a partnership with Moat for post-click engagement metrics in March; but the first Canadian publisher on board was actually The Globe and Mail, which integrated Moat measurement back in 2013.
Among global ad tech companies, Moat has a reputation for being a progressive leader in viewability measurement for both display and video. Its viewability measurement has been chosen as the standard by dozens of companies, including The Rubicon Project, Brightroll and Mediaocean. Toronto-based tech company Polar recently added Moat measurement to its native content publishing platform, so its publisher clients — which include The Globe and Postmedia — can measure deep metrics like average reading time on brand-sponsored articles and video.
For Bell, the deal marks a big step forward into digital media technology. The owner of TSN and CTV has been a long-time traditionalist when it comes to digital media sales, and remains the only major publisher in Canada that does not sell off remnant inventory through programmatic channels. Adding viewability doesn’t mean that stance will change, but it is an acknowledgement that advertisers expect a greater level of technological sophistication from digital media sellers than they do from conventional advertising channels.
Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Moat, complimented Bell for taking a progressive stance on media transparency. “Bell Media is taking a leadership position in the market and is helping to pave the way for greater transparency and success for marketers in digital,” he said in a release.
Correction: In an earlier version of this story, Stuart Garvie was described as the president of Bell Media. He is in fact the president of sales. Marketing regrets the error.
