If there’s one takeaway from the last few weeks of Impressions to Ballots, it’s that streaming is complicated.
Fragmentation, opaque buying strategies, and weak measurement have made it harder for campaigns to understand where their ads are actually running and who they are reaching.
Buyers often hide behind that complexity. And as a result, campaigns rarely get clear, actionable reports.
Campaigns should expect more. Buyers should deliver.
Why is reporting hard?
Streaming has grown quickly, and the measurement infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Here are a few of the problems our team runs into most often:
DSP reporting isn’t granular enough. Aggregated dashboards make it hard to identify fraud, off-target impressions, and other delivery issues.
Reach is often reported by device, not by people or households. DSPs also assume every impression is on-target, which simply isn’t true.
Streaming app reporting is messy. There is no consistent naming convention across platforms.
Linear and streaming data are siloed. Buyers rarely report reach and frequency across both.
How did we solve for this?
Our team invested years and millions of dollars in identity and data infrastructure to solve these problems for our political customers.
Impression-level ingestion. We ingest impression-level logs across platforms to see exactly where ads are running.
In-house identity graph. We match voter file records to impressions served to measure true on-target reach and no longer rely on DSP reach reporting.
Standardized app naming. We partnered with Jounce Media to create a common key for streaming app names, enabling consistent reporting of app delivery across platforms.
Unified video measurement. We model linear reach and frequency alongside unified streaming reach and frequency, giving campaigns a single view of their total video investment.
What should a streaming report look like?
Deduplicated app-level reporting to ensure you aren't over-delivering on any single app.
Device-level data to ensure that your ads are actually serving on the devices you expected.
Day-parting for streaming to ensure a disproportionate number of ads are not running overnight when the TV is off.
Daily Delivery and Pace to ensure campaigns are spending efficiently and will deliver on time and in-full.
What should a reach report look like?
Holistic reach and frequency measured across channels over time, giving buyers a single view of their total video investment.
A granular view of reach by medium, channel, and market so buyers can make real-time optimizations.
What does this mean for political advertisers?
Performance and reach reporting does not have to be siloed. Political buyers should demand unified reporting that shows performance and reach together across linear and streaming.
Transparency matters. Buyers should expect granular reporting that shows exactly where ads are running, how they are delivering, and whether impressions are actually reaching the intended audience.
Reporting should drive optimization. The best teams use this data to adjust campaigns in real time; shifting delivery across apps, devices, dayparts, and channels to maximize voter reach and campaign performance.
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