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Introducing SMI AccuTV – insight and accuracy into National TV ad spend and cost



A year ago the team at SMI set a lofty goal to challenge the status quo of advertising cost data and bring greater transparency, initially, to the National TV Market. Over these past twelve months, in became even clearer that the tool we were building was not just important, but vital. The industry has been in the middle of an extensive evolution, and at the forefront is a mandate to be more open and accountable to each other as well as an increasing focus on attribution.

That’s why we developed SMI AccuTV, a superior ad intelligence platform that delivers competitive ad spend and TV cost information in a single platform.

With accuracy and granularity being its core features, AccuTV gives the only clear 360-degree picture of US National TV ad spend available. SMI’s greatest asset is the incomparable quality of the real booking data we source from our participating agency partners. We use the power of this data to build AccuTV creating the first-ever platform to provide industry trends, benchmarking and pricing all in one place.

AccuTV is the only system that can deliver a highly accurate estimate of the total TV market in near real-time with spot count, average costs and product categories, all of which can be segmented by network, daypart and week day.

Let’s dive in to how we’re actually do this.

We’ve taken that real spend from our agency partners, which accounts for 70 percent of the marketplace, and have combined it with the best occurrence level data to model the remaining 30 percent. This combination allows us to have a clear and very accurate picture of what’s actually happening across 95 percent of the national TV market.

Once the model for AccuTV was perfected, we then built out dimensions to help answer key questions that many of our clients were asking. These dimensions include –

  • 35 product categories and 108 product subcategories such as wine and spirits or beer
  • Days of the week and spot lengths, which enable the ability to get specific insights on moments in time when coupled with daypart dimensions
  • 90 Networks, 9 Dayparts, 7 Weekdays, 8 Spot Length Averages, and 3 Buy Types enabling 80,000 unique average unit costs a month
  • 3 program genres and 16 subprogram genres including football, baseball, news, original dramas and live events like the Oscars.
  • The ability to stay on top of complete spot counts with paid and unpaid ADU’s
  • All advertisers outside our agency partners have been very accurately modelled giving you a view into where 30% of the brands in the market are spending and what they are paying

Sounds great – but what does this actually deliver for subscribers?

It means that with unrivaled insights, SMI AccuTV can help you become an even more competitive player in the marketplace, ultimately, helping you increase your bottom line.

  • You can keep track of your competitor’s revenue and costs at a very granular level
  • You can compare key product verticals and determine how you’re measuring up
  • You can better understand which dayparts and days are under or over performing in your and your competitor’s networks.
  • You can monitor and compare performance around your program genres and subgenres to better inform programming decision.

We would love to walk you through a demo of AccuTV and show you exactly how accurate the information is. If you’d like to take a deeper look, reach out to us here as we’re excited to share AccuTV with the world.


Standard Media Index is now a Guideline company

Learn more