What you need to know:

• Samba TV and Pubmatic cut deal, tout ability for TV advertisers to gain incremental reach across screens, better frequency control.
• Deal comes as Samba data suggests vast majority of linear TV ads reach half of TV viewers, risking oversaturation and missing light viewers.

Samba TV has struck a deal to integrate its first party CTV data into Pubmatic’s SSP. The two said it means Australian advertisers can now target TV audiences across all screens based on behaviour – and tap audiences that are becoming increasingly hard to reach on linear TV.

The partnership also touts better reach and frequency optimisation with the ability to de-duplicate ad exposure data however the content is delivered.

The deal follows Samba’s latest quarterly data, which suggests 95 per cent of linear TV ads reached roughly half of Australian TV viewers in Q4 2021, with more ads being served to those audiences. That risks over-saturation – annoying viewers and wasting brand dollars while missing light TV viewers, which have largely migrated to streaming platforms.

The data, based on 1.5bn impressions, suggests only 5 per cent of quarterly impressions were served to light TV viewers – despite those viewers comprising almost half of Australian households – while the percentage of light viewers being reached by linear TV declined markedly year on year.

“The partnership…provides advertisers with the opportunity to effectively reach TV audiences across every screen with confidence and scale,” said Samba TV MD Yasmin Sanders.

Peter Barry, Pubmatic’s Addressability VP, claimed the deal means ad buyers can “deliver relevant ad experiences at scale, thereby optimising campaign performance”.

While Samba already has buy-side (DSP) deals with both MiQ and The Trade Desk in place, the PubMatic deal is understood to be the first announced with a supply-side platform (SSP) as the CTV audience measurement firm bids for Australian expansion.