TV measurement firm EDO may have taken a hit after a jury ordered it to pay $18.3 million in damages to rival iSpot. Now, it’s striking back by giving ad agencies free access to TV ad intelligence data, which reveals information like when brands were on air and how many impressions they got.
Beyond iSpot, companies like Samba TV, Innovid’s TVSquared, and VideoAmp, typically make money by selling this data.
EDO’s focus is on outcomes data, revealing whether TV ads drove a business result, so its decision to give away TV ad intelligence data for free could potentially undercut its competitors without interfering with its primary revenue stream.
“Agencies’ margins are challenged and base subscriptions such as measurement data are recovered via overhead multipliers within retainers,” said Laura Bajkowski, who advises brands on their agency partnerships as principal of Bajkowski + Partners. “With EDO providing agencies with free access to its non-core measurement data, it will likely put tremendous pressure on its competitors such as Nielsen and iSpot to follow suit. This could upend the subscription model as agencies look to cut costs.”
Agencies will be able to access this data for free via an AI-powered portal called ChatEDO, which is built on Snowflake’s Cortex infrastructure and powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus model. That platform’s alpha version is now accessible. The launch coincides with iSpot’s Disrupt event on Wednesday. iSpot declined a request for comment.
Accessing 375 million TV ad airings
The move arrives weeks before the upfronts, when the world’s leading TV networks and streaming platforms, including NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix, and Amazon, will preview forthcoming programming and sell significant portions of ad inventory in advance.
The chatbot will give users access to EDO’s base layer of ad intelligence for linear TV, including which ad creatives ran, when and where they aired, estimated impressions, and estimated spend. Users can also watch specific ads.
It will not include audience measurement, detailing who saw a given ad and how many of those viewers were part of the advertiser’s target audience, nor EDO’s core offerings of outcome measurement and engagement metrics; access to that data will be paid. For now, the tool is limited to linear TV data—which includes 375 million airings from 120 national TV networks and 2.6 million specific ads from more than 35,000 brands. EDO plans to fold in its streaming data in the coming months.
“There’s a lot of really useful things [in this data] that agencies spend hours and hours on,” said Kevin Krim, EDO’s president and CEO. With ChatEDO, he said, “You can watch the video of the creative, you can say, ‘What’s my share of voice?’ You can say, ‘Who’s growing, who’s shrinking, and who’s spending my category?’”
