Vizio Ads Closes Upfront with $100M+ In Commitments

Vizio today said it has closed its 2022 upfront negotiations and secured brand and agency advertising commitments in excess of $100 million, a fourfold increase over 2021.

These commitments include enterprise-level buys from six major agency holding companies and increased investment from a number of top advertising categories in traditional TV such as automotive, insurance and retail. Vizio said its upfront success is supplemented by its growing direct advertising business, which in the last year has doubled participating unique brands and tripled average revenue per advertiser.

The company said this accelerating advertiser demand “is aligned with broader market shifts, as consumers increasingly move from linear TV to streaming and advertisers seek the unique audiences that Vizio — whose smart TVs are in millions of homes across America — supplies. Increased demand can also be attributed to Vizio’s diverse, innovative ad offerings introduced during the 2021 IAB NewFronts, and its strategic use of its Inscape Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data, which allows Vizio to package media spend commitments with data licenses for planning and measurement.”

“We’ve developed an advertising business model that is unique in the industry,” said Mike O’Donnell, chief revenue officer of Vizio’s Platform Business. “We’re providing agencies with access to premium CTV inventory, the ability to target and measure with precision and access to insights that can inform their investment strategies for all linear and CTV.”

Vizio Ads offerings are fueled by Inscape’s audience data from next-level ACR technology. Vizio says Inscape’s glass-level TV viewing data allows Vizio to offer its advertising partners measurement products that “demonstrate the incremental reach of Vizio’s streaming audiences, and provide attribution that connects ad buys to business incomes. In addition, the company recently announced frequency capping, which gives brands control over how often a device is exposed to an ad on Vizio smart TVs. The data also enables advertisers to reach the Vizio audience across mobile devices, desktops, and tablets, delivering the right advertising to the right audience at the right time.”