For many advertisers, the best part about the shift to streaming TV is the ability to extend their reach using programmatic buys.

It’s also the worst part.

There are far too many moving pieces for a single company to handle, and it’s hard to enforce frequency capping, cut down on ad fraud and actually have a say in which programs your ads wind up on.

Or it was, anyway.

A new solution from New York-based MadHive provides a one-stop shop of sorts to alleviate many of those issues.

Dubbed the Audience Forecaster Suite, it’s being adopted by broadcast groups like FOX and TEGNA and who operate across all 210+ DMAs.

MadHive helped all three companies build successful, differentiated digital businesses and now they’re helping them proactively solve the problems that stem from that shift to digital.

Frequency capping, for the uninitiated, is a way to ensure that the same viewer only sees the same ad a certain number of times. It’s become a real issue on streaming because as targeting gets tighter, the number of people who meet the requirements of those new and improved targets (e.g., new car intenders) gets smaller too, and if an advertiser has a sizable ad budget, there’s a real danger they’re going to hit the same viewer far too many times.

While repeating a message can be useful, there’s a point at which even the most clever ads stop being welcome and start becoming annoying, thus creating a negative rather than a positive impact.

Identifying and preventing ad fraud is another issue of the digital age and MadHive has been at the forefront there as well. 

While many in the industry tend to assume that ad fraud is limited to digital, the rapid growth of CTV advertising has caught the attention of scammers who are becoming more aggressive and more clever in their attempts. MadHive has identified instances where as much as 20% of CTV inventory is fraudulent, but by using a proprietary blend of cryptography and blockchain technology, they’ve been able to weed it out.

“We first started working with MadHive in 2017 to power our local OTT reach extension business and to build trust and bring transparency to the CTV/OTT marketplace,” said Tom Cox, president of Premion. “MadHive’s ability to weed out suspicious inventory has been critical to our value proposition with our customers. Looking forward, we will continue to build bespoke products on MadHive’s infrastructure to drive the future of television.”

While the TV industry has long relied on Nielsen to measure linear TV, streaming, which is not watched in real time, presents a whole new set of challenges. MadHive’s technology allows clients to track key metrics like incremental reach, which tracks the ability to hit streaming audiences who have not seen an ad on linear TV, a key stat at a time when audiences often split their viewing time between broadcast and streaming, which, for local broadcasters can happen on vMVPDs, their own station apps and via their news programming on services like Haystack and NewsOn.

A Full Stack Solution For Broadcasters

The MadHive platform is being billed as a “full stack solution” as, in addition to frequency capping, it provides additional transparency around delivery guarantees and even uses AI to make recommendations from over 300 billion available ad slots each month (“avails” in industry parlance.)

For brands that want to see digital style measurement (e.g., most of them) MadHive is able to offer real-time data against a variety of parameters including location, demographics, behavioral profiles, and campaign constraints like frequency capping. 

“The concept of delivery guarantees is a longstanding tradition in the world of linear, but delivery can be difficult to predict in the programmatic landscape,” said Adam Helfgott, CEO of MadHive. “Developing an accurate forecasting methodology involves building a robust technical infrastructure capable of ingesting, organizing, and optimizing billions of signals.”

For local broadcasters, having a one-stop source for most all their CTV needs has proven to be a boon. Their inventory can be found on a number of streaming platforms and apps, all of which have different ways of handling ad insertions and measurement. In addition, they need to integrate the results from that streaming inventory with the results from their linear broadcast inventory. That’s why being able to more accurately forecast who will see their ads, where they are and what programming the ads will appear on is such a boon.

“One of the things really resonating with the local broadcasters is that MadHive gives them the ability to create unique, proprietary offerings for their customers,” added Helfgott.

By introducing sophisticated technology, broadcast groups are showing why they still remain very relevant to advertisers. Frequency capping (or the lack thereof) is a problem across the board and a solution that solves it at a local level is going to be welcomed by advertisers on many levels.

“I’ve been doing this type of stuff for a while and we couldn’t have found a better partner than MadHive,” said Michael Page, Vice President of Digital Sales at Fox Television Stations. “They give me great insights about the business and they’ve become my go-to source for what’s going on out there.”