Author: Joseph Gray

System Status – 5/2/2022

Joseph Gray System Status

We are having issues with playback of airing level videos and thumbnails today. The wrong files are being played back in many instances. We expect this issue will be resolved in 48 hours or less.

There is also an issue with extra short form spot detections during infomercial blocks that will be fixed momentarily.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

5/4/22 Update – Fix was pushed to production for airing level videos yesterday. Also, we have removed all of the erroneous short form detections that creep into our data during infomercial time blocks. Please email support@drmetrix.com if you encounter any issues!

6th Annual AdSphere™ Award Winners Announced

Joseph Gray AdSphere

6th Annual AdSphere™ Awards

 Recognize Top Direct-to-Consumer Advertisers in 2021

AbbVie, Geico, CarShield, E. Mishan & Sons, SharkNinja, Beachbody, Luminess Direct, Ideavillage, among those taking top honors.

SAN DIEGO- (February 28, 2022) – Direct-to-consumer advertisers spent over 20.2 billion on national cable and broadcast networks in 2021 according to DRMetrix, an iSpot company.  To celebrate the industry’s accomplishments, the AdSphere™ Awards will honor the direct-to-consumer industry’s top advertisers and brands.

The awards presentation will take place at PDMI EAST 2022, where the leaders in Performance-Driven Marketing will come together in Miami Beach, Florida from March 13-15th, 2022.  The AdSphere™ Awards is the first awards program to be inclusive of the entire direct-to-consumer industry with advertisers such as Amazon, Samsung, Southern New Hampshire University, Consumer Cellular, Zip Recruiter, NortonLifeLock, Wayfair.com, Chewy.com, Quicken Loans, PetSmart, and many others being honored.

“The AdSphere awards recognize best-of-class advertisers and brands across four industry classifications including brand/direct, lead generation, short-form products, and 28.5-minute infomercials,” said Joseph Gray, founder of the AdSphere Awards and DRMetrix.  “Direct-to-consumer campaigns achieving this level of scale demonstrate consumer popularity and best-in-class creative and media execution.  The AdSphere Awards are the most inclusive award program for the entire direct-to-consumer industry recognizing nearly 70 honorees including all of our best-of-category award recipients.”

AdSphere monitors a universe of 130+ national networks on a 24/7/365 basis.  In just over eight years, AdSphere has identified over 14,000 direct-to-consumer brands.  In addition to detecting over 700,000 infomercial (28.5 minute) airings, AdSphere has detected over 90 million spots of varying creative lengths up to five minutes in duration.  The awards recognize top brands across a wide range of industry categories representing all facets of the industry.  AdSphere segments campaigns across over 190 major categories and sub-categories. The complete list of AdSphere Award winners is online at www.drmetrix.com/adsphere-awards.html.

About DRMetrix

DRMetrix, an iSpot.tv company, monitors over 130 national TV networks 24/7/365, tracking direct-to-consumer ads using all creative lengths including spot, 5-min, and long-form which include web addresses, mobile app response, SMS, or toll free numbers.  For more information, please visit www.drmetrix.com and be sure and download our latest direct-to-consumer industry study!

Exciting New Developments

Joseph Gray AdSphere

Dear Clients,

Since iSpot.tv acquired DRMetrix in October of 2021, we have been working together to improve the accuracy of DRMetrix’s automated content recognition (ACR) which is the core technology that tracks TV ad occurrences. As a result of this collaboration, we are pleased to announce that DRMetrix has migrated to its new ACR backend technology powered by iSpot.tv!

Media Week 8 (Week of 2/14/22) marks the first full week running on our new ACR technology platform and we are really excited about the improvements that have been made.

The team at iSpot.tv has been amazing and they have worked very hard to accommodate the unique needs of DRMetrix, and the direct response industry, including the development of 28.5 minute infomercial detection, airing level videos, video thumbnail images, and so much more.

We are looking forward to building upon this new technology framework to bring a number of industry firsts to market. To begin, over the course of the next few weeks, we will begin expanding the number of networks monitored and, later this year, we will begin tracking ad occurrences across ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX affiliates in the top 27 markets.

We are grateful for the support of our clients during this transitional period and we look forward to bringing many new innovative capabilities to the DRMetrix platform.

Please stay tuned for more exciting announcements!

System Status 12/14/21

Joseph Gray System Status

2:15PM ET Update – Appears we had a hardware issue crop up this AM that the team has been working on the past hour. If you’re seeing this message, that’s progress! We hope to have AdSphere back online momentarily and apologize for the issue.

3:10PM ET Update – It appears there was some kind of hardware/software issue in the control module of our SAN storage system. The underlying issue has been resolved but it appears it’s going to take most of the day to get systems back to normal. Our apologies and we will post more information as it becomes available.

4:30PM ET Update – Progress is being made but our team is still working on getting all of the critical systems back online after the control module issue of earlier today. We should be back to normal by end of day.

6:00PM ET Update – Adsphere is back online. We appreciate everyone’s patience today! Thank you.

iSpot Acquires DRMetrix To Bolster DTC, Direct Response Offerings and Addressable Advertising Capabilities

Joseph Gray AdSphere , , , , ,

BELLEVUE — Oct. 11th, 2021 — iSpot.tv, the real-time platform for measuring the business and brand impact of cross-platform TV advertising, today announced the acquisition of DRMetrix, a real-time TV ad measurement company specializing in products for direct-to-consumer and direct-response TV advertisers. 

The deal expands iSpot’s measurement of emerging formats for addressable advertising and enhances its ability to track rotating calls-to-actions, including website URLs, SMS and toll-free numbers. This capability — coupled with iSpot’s ability to track distinct creatives at scale and correlate ad exposures to conversion events such as digital actions and in-store traffic — gives brands of all sizes the expanded ability to measure the business impact of complex and dynamic ad buys across platforms. 

“iSpot is constantly investing in the development and acquisition of technologies required to accurately measure the TV advertising of tomorrow,” says Sean Muller, founder and CEO of iSpot. “DRMetrix has developed unique and real-time measurement capabilities around creative versioning and dynamic advertising that will become increasingly important as the TV ad market evolves.” 

DRMetrix’s AdSphere™ developed a measurement system for monitoring all TV ad formats and executions including those delivered via digital program insertion (DPI) ad breaks. The DPI measurement capabilities allow precise identification of ad creatives that are sold by the cable networks as “cover-ups,” which MVPDs inconsistently overlay with their own inventories. 

This inventory, which includes addressable and local advertising, creates a continuous blind spot for networks, agencies and brands. The cover-ups are a favorite means for DTC and DR advertisers to invest in and test television, as they often come at a heavy discount. But both the buy and sell side struggle to accurately quantify the performance and value of this inventory because, until the combination of DRMetrix and iSpot, they could not be measured precisely at scale. 

“We developed a unique system for accurately measuring one of the most dynamic and difficult portions of TV advertising, and we amassed a client base that represents a growing and important part of the TV ecosystem,” says Joseph Gray, founder/CEO of DRMetrix. “In iSpot, we’ve found a home for our innovations to thrive and a vehicle to accelerate our shared goals of making all TV ad measurement more transparent, more actionable and easier.”

The combined capability will also create cost savings for advertisers that traditionally rely on spike analysis, rotating phone numbers and links as the primary means for attribution.

DRMetrix serves 120 brands, networks and agencies, growing iSpot’s customer footprint to more than 450 annual brand subscriptions representing 60%+ of brands in the Ad Age 100 and 95% of TV networks in North America. This is iSpot’s second acquisition of a real-time ad measurement company. It acquired Ace Metrix in January to combine business and brand impact using Ace’s comprehensive qualitative approach to measurement and scoring of creative performance. 

About iSpot

iSpot.tv is the market leader in real-time cross-platform TV ad measurement and attribution. The company’s always-on platform measures the business impact and brand impact of TV advertising and offers fast, accurate and actionable information that empowers brands to justify and optimize TV and video investments.

iSpot persistently measures TV-device impressions and second-by-second attention for all TV ads in a unified manner across linear, time-shifted, VOD and streaming environments. iSpot’s Ace Metrix product measures brand perceptions for TV and video creatives using rapid qualitative panels, and its market-leading attribution solution enables advertisers and TV networks to plan, optimize and transact on business outcomes. 

iSpot delivers its solution in real time via intuitive and modern dashboards as well as APIs and customized analytics. iSpot.tv has hundreds of brands and all major TV networks licensing its enterprise solution and has become a trusted currency for both networks and brands. Founded in Bellevue, Washington in 2013, iSpot has offices in major cities across America.

System Status – 8/24/21

Joseph Gray System Status

Problem with airing level videos

A recently discovered issue is impacting airing level video playback. An airing level video should be available for the first 10 days after a creative airs. This is a helpful feature for creatives that use different 800 numbers across different networks or make any creative modifications which may be network or airing specific. When one clicks view links, during the initial 10 day window for any airing, such as in airing detail excel outputs or in the network log view, the video that plays should be of the actual airing and contain the correct 800 number, etc. Currently, the system is not playing the correct airing level video but rather a video sample of the creative which can be from any network.

For advertisers using different 800 numbers across networks, this situation may result in the wrong 800 number appearing in the video playback for airing level videos. This situation is due to a programming error on the part of our AdSphere development team and we are still working to determine when this issue started. Normally, user input would have exposed this type of issue, however, in this particular case, a member of our team happened to notice the issue. Our AdSphere development team is currently working to fix this issue and the plan is to push the fix to AdSphere on Friday of this week after they spend 2-3 days doing proper quality control checks. We sincerely apologize for this issue.

8/27/21 Update – The fix for airing level videos has been pushed to production. Please report any issues to support@drmetrix.com

System Status – 8/18/21

Joseph Gray System Status

There was a major power issue this evening that we understand impacted a rather large 30+ mile radius area which happens to include DRMetrix’s data center. In addition to the power related issues, part of a fiber optics ring was taken offline causing a regional loss of internet which impacted websites across the region. One of DRMetrix’s uninterruptable power supplies was damaged during the event. As a result, we have numerous servers that have to be rebooted, file integrity scans performed, etc. One of our database servers was also damaged and needs to be repaired. Presently, we have a technical support team working on all of these issues but it is going to take some time to resolve all of them. Please know that videos and thumbnails will not work until database server is repaired. It’s unlikely that all systems will be fully restored by the morning so these impacts may continue during the day on Thursday. We’ll post here as additional details become available.

8/19/21 7:00AM Update – Repairs are still ongoing. AdSphere is currently in maintenance mode but we are trying to bring it back online. When we do, initially videos and thumbnails may not work until repair on video database server is also complete. That process is ongoing. Will post update when we have an ETA on completion.

8/19/21 9:47AM Update – AdSphere is back online but work on DB server for video and thumbnails is still ongoing. A message will appear that video and thumbnails are not available and to try again in some time. Recovery of additional servers to get ad detections functioning normally again is ongoing.

8/19/21 8:30pm. Video and thumbnails are working once more in AdSphere.