Havas Media Group Partners With Samba TV To Integrate Linear TV, Streaming, Gaming Data

Havas Media Group (HMG) North America and Samba TV announced today they are partnering to integrate Samba TV’s industry-leading OTT and linear television viewing data into Converged, HMG’s proprietary audience and data management platform. With this partnership, HMG North America says it will become the first major agency holding company to fully integrate Samba TV’s rich television and gaming viewership data.

Each year, consumers continue to shift their viewership preferences across various programming and streaming services, making an increasingly expanded set of choices about where they spend their time. Samba TV’s viewership insights are sourced from more than 24 diverse television manufacturers, creating a highly representative viewership data set that will provide HMG clients with granular insights into the household viewing behaviors of their customers to guide future media buying strategies.

Mike Bregman, Havas Media Group North America chief data officer, said: “Samba TV’s direct relationship with the consumer and the accuracy of their data — which we have found to be the most representative TV data set in the U.S. — will provide our clients with powerful new tools and insights needed to find difficult to reach audiences and engage consumers today across every screen.

“Modern media is about more than just reach and frequency — our approach prioritizes identifying the right environment based on the ability to foster meaningful connections with viewers. This partnership allows us to understand how consumers spend time across screens and the ability to analyze the unique value media has for each one of our clients.”

The partnership adds Samba TV’s layer of viewership behaviors to other data sources already integrated into Converged, such as purchase behavior and other advertiser first-party data sources, allowing HMG teams to create more sophisticated customer viewing insights for its media clients. This dataset inclusion, the company says, lets HMG North America further develop its innovative technology and data stack and provide unique solutions to clients, while also helping to improve the way the agency drives brand results across planning, activation, and measurement.

Kris Magel, head of agency and publisher solutions at Samba TV, said: “Havas Media is on the leading edge of audience insights with their Converged platform. With the integration of Samba’s TV data, Havas will understand the linear and streaming TV viewing behaviors of their clients’ most valuable customer prospects as opposed to legacy age and gender proxies, rendering their media and investment strategies far more business-focused and effective.”